Festival Dance

Scottish Ballet

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

five stars

WHOOPS cheers, riotous applause. Dancers are taking a bow at the end of Crystal Pite’s Emergence – and you recognise them. Of course you do, this is your home team: Scottish Ballet. But this time they are leaving the uncanny impression that some other company has just filled the stage with shockwaves of radical choreography beyond anything they’ve shown us before.

In fact, the Preljocaj piece – MC 14/22 (Ceci est mon corps) – hasn’t been done, even by his own company for years. Any artistic director who catches sight of it now, will surely hanker to have it in their company’s repertoire – if they can call on a cadre of male dancers who have the stamina, the grit, the disciplined physicality to carry out the gruelling rituals that Preljocaj has attached to the Last Supper, the breaking of bread, and the words “Take it:this is my body”. The dozen, bare-torso’d, men on-stage could be in a seminary, a cult, perhaps an army of the Lord, but their cooped-up closeness leads to a bullying brutality, and an aggressive, predatory sexuality that objectifies the chosen one as meat on a slab. Yet there is a very real beauty in the mosaic of maleness, not least under the Caravaggio glow that bathes their “Last Supper” tableaux.

Pite’s Emergence is also akin to a baptism of fire, this time for the entire company. The backdrop suggests the entry to a hive, and indeed, both the soundscore and her movement motifs evoke swarming bees, not as some Disney-fied species but as a rigorously organised community. The awkward angularities she sets on limbs – including those balancing in pointe shoes – edges the dancers away from their natural body lines, drives duets and ensembles into connecting without eye contact, but rather through instinct. Again, the sheer intensity of its “otherness” makes it mesmerising. What a triumph for everyone, but especially the dancers.

Sponsored by Baillie Gifford