Scottish Dance Theatre: Revenge of the Impossible Things, Self-Observation without Judgement, My House is Melting

A youthful, fresh-faced company in a mixed bill of fare


Eight figures in backless, white lab coats are walking up the side of a building when a woman sees them through her office window and says: “Isn’t that Scottish Dance Theatre?”

Actually, the story we are told is pure fabrication: they are just walking across a bare stage. But it is Scottish Dance Theatre, in Tom Roden and Pete Shenton’s Revenge of the Impossible Things, a blithely comic game of make-believe. We are shown an experiment in flying (man remains supine) and a couple in a Rome cafe or lying in a field (they sit, they lie). Action and narration are kept firmly apart. When the dancers, happily rabbit-hopping, are joined by a man in full rabbit costume, the intrusion on their illusion is too much, and he is summarily shot, off stage. The piece is fresh and funny.

Altogether darker in tone is Victor Quijada’s Self-Observation Without Judgement. Montreal-based Quijada was break dancing before formal dance training, and he melds that influence effectively but unobtrusively into his style: shoulders scudding against the floor, blunt rhythms, low-slung moves with hooked legs and feline twists. The piece conjures a restless, faintly menacing atmosphere of urban isolation, the dancers in combat trousers and T-shirts caught in cones of light on the darkened stage. The slow-burn emotional intensity builds to a compelling, combative duet for Ruth Janssen and Kevin Turner, their tense, coiled energies alternately sprung and blocked in dense arcs and angles.

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On safer territory is Beth Cassani’s My House Is Melting, a sequence of short choreographic studies tenuously linked by a moveable door and a swinging pendulum of ice that marks the dripping passage of time. Anthony Missen has a cartoonishly grotesque turn, all hunched shoulders and exaggerated tiptoes, and there is a lovely episode with Janssen repeatedly scrambling onto a table to topple swooningly into the arms of assorted men, like a starlet eagerly replaying her one climactic scene. This is a patchy piece, but the company’s youthful, fresh-faced vigour is disarming.