Royston Maldoom Retrospective

Royston Maldoom Retrospective

Festival Theatre Studio, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

FOR generations of Scottish dance-makers - especially those who were green lads and lasses in the 1970s and 80s - one name remains talismanic: Royston Maldoom.

If his energies as Fife's Dance Artist-in-Residence (1980-83) kick-started the enterprise that we now know as Scottish Dance Theatre, his innovations at community level have now proved a role model for other initiatives across the UK and beyond - his itchy feet and creative impulses have taken him from Lithuania to Ethiopia and Lima (where he worked with socially handicapped children).Maldoom's global fostering of dance, especially among the disadvantaged, has brought him a slew of awards, an OBE among them.

But Edinburgh Choreographic Project's performance of four short pieces from his back catalogue has come as a welcome reminder of what underpins his ongoing achievements: choreographic flair. In a group work like The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, set to James MacMillan's music, her joyful sensuality is juxtaposed with the dramatic threat of stick-wielding Persecutors.

The contrast between her lyrical reveries with their regimented formations conjures up a vivid sense of blinkered prejudice unnerved and provoked by 'difference'.

The same group of dancers will loosen up merrily to close the night in a flurry of playful shimmies as they hit the groove in Hook.

Joel Wilson brings a pliant serenity to the elegantly cursive lines of the programme's opening solo, Black Earth before - in company with Ross Cooper and Katerina Chatzaki - revealing the bold balances, held tensions and shifts of attraction in Adagietto No 5, Maldoom's own first choreography... a first step that even now has freshness and appeal as well as Maldoom's signature musicality.