Dance
Dreamers/Process Day
Traverse, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
FIVE STARS
FIRST half, and Anton Lachky sends Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) bursting out of their skins in a high noon of fantasy with Dreamers (premiered 2015). Underneath the prim exteriors lie contrary impulses that can’t cut loose in reality but in imagination...
The dancers, all keen to step out of line, move like fleas on a hot plate: individually agile, springy and fast but a meticulously synchronised ensemble when governed by a wannabe puppet-master. It’s funny, it’s sharp and it’s wise: inside, we’re all dreamers – only nowhere near as lithely mercurial as the SDT cohorts who dance so vividly to the tune of Bach and Verdi.
Process Day, the company’s newly-premiered work by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, turns SDT into creatures of the night. The dancers become shadow souls in an unspecified limbo where techno music (Ori Lichtik) takes over minds and bodies in a dance that is erotically charged and ritualistic, tinged with hints of arousal and yet, somehow, reminiscent of the cellular joining and splitting that is the origin of life (and gender) itself.
When the movement slips into phrases of mechanistic thrusting, the unisex unitards, pale on top/black below, render the dancers cogs in a machine. Elsewhere, the costumes hint at cult membership where the re-iterated movements – including tiny tremors that visibly course through limbs – bond bodies into a cluster of shared ecstasy. It feels, and looks, primal and yet futuristic. Lone males stand still, as if their focussed energy field will draw others out of the gloom. When they come, the sheer intensity of their slinking, sinuous, quivering and touching – of their own, and others’ bodies – thrums with a sense of forbidden mysteries. Your imagination tingles: this is bold, breath-taking stuff performed by a company at the top of its game.
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