Dance
Temporary Store (four stars)
Where Home Is (three stars)
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
This second double bill at DIG (Dance International Glasgow) favours the radical and experimental - hurrah! Colette Sadler’s choreography has often explored liminal states, points where humanity shape-shifts (as do our perceptions of it). Her vision in Temporary Store is fascinating, futuristic: a way of over-riding death by becoming a digitised, virtual being with total recall...but no flesh and blood physicality. This transition occupies another crossover point, where the hi-tech element of video imagery is allied to ancient Greek mythology where a coin buys you passage to the Underworld over the river Styx.
There is a cleverly calculated meshing together of these strands, reinforced by the swirling - almost mesmeric - patterning of the words VesselsINC and then STYX across the floor and upstage screen, almost like a re-programming tool that codifies the minds and movements of Sadler’s dancers. As the soundscore pulses and thrums, Leah Marojevic and Samir Kennedy - both in grey unitards - go through motions that apparently define them. She has a long-limbed elegance and poise, he has the quixotic grace - and courtly hand gestures - of a bygone age: both are a joy to watch.
A series of blackouts marks their transition into virtual selves. Now clad in semi-transparent white boiler-suits, they revisit earlier moves albeit with hesitations - what is unaltered, however, is their need for companionship and closeness. The touch of a hand still matters...
Stephanie McMann, Eleanor Sikorski and Flora Wellesley Wesley - aka dance group Nora - invited veteran American choreographer Deborah Hay to make a work with them. Where Home Is abjures narratives other than the dancer’s own movement vocabulary and their responses to a performance space. It can look haphazard. But what emerges is their shared interest in the immediacy, and the transience, of live dance and their willingness to challenge audiences to be watchful, in the moment, with them. Shades of Hay’s 60’s Judson adventuring - as provocative as ever!
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