Scottish Dance Theatre, 21 years old this year, has thrived during the last decade under the directorship of Janet Smith. A choreographer of considerable inventiveness herself, she’s also proved an adept programmer, commissioning an eclectic range of works that are accessible but never safe, always pushing the audience beyond the comfort zone. The youthful, exceptionally convivial company tours widely in Scotland and occasionally to England – and I, for one, generally find their annual London season a breath of fresh air.
This year was no exception, with a double bill of Liv Lorent’s tenderhook and Hofesh Shechter’s DOG. Lorent had previously choreographed one of the company’s hits, Luxuria, an achingly sensuous work that had audiences melting in their seats. Her new commission is less directly romantic, but no less moving. Its one principal motif – the eight dancers whirling ribbons on sticks – is a simple device that accumulates emotional layers as the choreography progresses. Opening with Ezio Bozzo’s nostalgic, music-box chimes, the dancers initially appear like fey childhood dolls, teetering on pointe as their spinning streamers leave cartoonish movement traces in the space around them. As the music grows more lush, something more magical and intimate begins to happen. Couples form and disperse; one partner will tenderly clasp the other’s legs so that she (or he) can tilt vertiginously, or arch back with abandon – on the inside, you feel they could almost be flying. The music swells like a tide, the lights dim, and for a while all we see are luminous streamers trailing in the air like fireflies.
It’s a rapturous moment: the dancers seem to have dematerialised, leaving an afterglow of pure spirit. But the lights return and the streamers fizzle out like the firework tails; the dancers are no longer able to keep them in motion. Again, the cast form fluid partnerships, helping each other to reach and swoop – but now, it seems, they’re merely reliving memories. Make of it what you will (I thought of the departed magic of childhood, of a paradise lost), you cannot fail to be moved. “I’m interested in how much and what kind of emotion I can make people feel,” Lorent has said, and in tenderhook, characteristically, she achieves this not by stories and characters but by more directly physical means – the sway of a spine, the touch of skin on skin, the tug of gravity and the freedom of falling – and so reminds us that the word ‘feeling’ translates both emotion and sensation.
Paired with the low-key tenderhook, its title all in lower-case letters, is Hofesh Shechter’s punchy, upper-case DOG. It’s another piece for eight dancers, but what a difference, in style and substance. Again, the stage is often very dark; but whereas in Lorent’s piece darkness connotes mystery, in Shechter’s it feels tense, sinister. DOG is not without humour – it opens with a guy on doggy all-fours, and there’s a portentous, ironic voiceover about dolphins communicating. The rest of the piece flashes by like a filmic montage. There are reptilian thrashings on the floor, donkey kicks, wolfish lopes, and a kind of chimpanzee samba, complete with flailing arms and jiggling hips.
With its high-tension score lurching from bass rumblings to crashing cacophony, and its dancers pushed through tautly choreographed chaos, this is a sometimes overwrought work, and there’s a little too much of it, even though it’s never less than gripping to watch. Who knows what it’s all for? It occurred to me that DOG is the reverse of GOD; certainly there’s a sense of unfettered animalistic evolution, with Shechter taking devilish delight in his crazed creatures and their mutant metamorphoses. The dancers delight in DOG too, imparting a youthful, enthusiastic spirit that’s positively puppyish.