Scottish Dance Theatre is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a double bill of works, Letters from America. This is their third trip south in recent years. Sadly, I found the programme less satisfying than the works presented in two previous visits, despite the fact that these two American choreographers have won many awards.
Lay Me Down Safe is by New Yorker Kate Weare, “a tender foray into our human inexperience at reckoning with desire and loss”. Katherina Radeva has dressed the boys and girls in the sort of short shifts that you see worn by Roman slaves in epic movies. They are so awful, so unflattering, so crudely fitted, that it’s hard to imagine desire managing to develop among them at all. The dancing is fine, though the work seems rather uninspired, and despite the fact that she is a woman, Weare seems to favour the five male dancers, among whom there is a homoerotic tension.
Benjamin Levy hails from San Francisco, and his work Khaos (pictured) “explores the disctinction between continual, shifting change, and transformation such that we no longer feel the same afterwards”. Given that shots ring out at the end of the piece and all but one are dead, I guess they certainly don’t feel the same — if they feel at all! However, despite the rather pretentious yet vague programme note, the dances here are imaginative.
Again, the choreography seems to favour the men — there are only three girls in the cast anyway — with an intriguing section in which four men dance a quartet, like a community of individual creatures seeking some kind of overall structure for their group. This is faster paced than much of the action, but, throughout the work, there are interesting passages. At one point dancers are enveloped in an enormous, inflated, cloud-like structure.
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