W’hat About?

Platform, The Bridge, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

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THE jolly set for Fuora Dance Project’s family show gives us a humorous heads-up: even the seat inside a circle of hats looks like... a hat. Robert (Scott Noble) arrives and he’s a (non-dancing) narrator, telling us about hat-making, his granddaughters who are coming from Italy and their mother who (we assume) has died.

Frankly, it’s a lot of text for very young audiences to take in, but when the sisters bounce on-stage, they prove to be the kind of energetic, knockabout double act that tinies find hugely entertaining. It doesn’t matter that they speak very rapid Italian, not English: their expressive body language is easily understood and their sisterly squabblings are fun to watch.

Fuora’s artistic director and choreographer Giulia Montalbano nonetheless has some serious themes in mind. This visit by the sisters - performed by Selene Travaglia and Montalbano herself - is about bringing family together across not just miles but generations, while the grief of bereavement is still affecting them all.

Adults can discern all this quite easily, but the dots - such as they are - don’t really join up for most wee ones. They love the sisters’ acting up and the way that hats pop out of an upstage screen, as if by magic, and become part of impromptu, boisterous games. But the sitting still episodes, when lonely old Robert reminisces about the girls’ mother, is a bigger ask for the attention span of many youngsters and the final section is puzzlingly downbeat.

The sisters sit behind the upstage screen and - in a prolonged piece of shadow-play - make a ‘special hat’ for the mother they miss. We never see the hat, or indeed them with it. What is intended to be wistful, magical, fun even, has no flesh-and-blood connection to what’s gone before - a shame, because it leaves a lot of previously engaged tots wondering what the show was actually about.