Dance

Danza Contemporanea de Cuba

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

Four stars

THREE dance pieces, each one with a distinctive – and thrillingly dissimilar – dynamic and movement vocabulary. One company, Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, responding to the shifting demands of this touring triple bill with an ease that beggars superlatives: from cool to hot, they’ve got it nailed.

Reversible, from Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa took full advantage of the sinuous-sensual timbre that these dancers deliver as soon as the percussing rhythms flood into their bodies. Here, the women are wearing the trousers – the bare-chested men are in little grey kilts – and it’s the women who tend to initiate the contact, and the kissing, in this mating ritual of the uber-toned and slinkily pliant. If there’s humour in the role reversal, there’s a primal urgency in the coming together of various he's and she's – seemingly on hormonal impulse, and yet never slack or raggedy.

British dance-maker, Theo Clinkard, engulfs the entire company in baggy shirts and shorts – a somewhat geeky look – for The Listening Room, a clever left-field scenario in which everyone is hooked up, by headphones, to their own silent disco. When the music does reach our ears, it’s the looping, minimalist mantras of Steve Reich that are unlocking loose-limbed riffs on moves that are (almost) everyday: hip sways, shoulder rolls, maybe hints of street-dance prowess. Individuality struts its stuff, and yet clusters form and get into a shared groove – which even flips into the choreographed synchronicity of a dance class – before it ends on a lone dude dancing to the music in his own head... as you do, though probably not with his pzazz.

The company’s resident Cuban choreographer, George Cespedes, makes all citizens soldiers in Matria Etnocentra – this is pride in nationhood incarnate, be it drilling crisply with regimented precision or breaking out into dazzling dance routines that shimmy with palpable joy.