7734 @ Macrobert, Stirling

At the start of the second act, fans of dance will note that the very fact of two acts expresses how ambitious and well-tended Jasmin Vardimon's lastest trip to the dark side is. Three dancers take time to meditate on a story that explains art's relationship to life. Almost a critical justification for the entire show, they suggest that art's job is to magnify the darkness, to pull out the undercurrents of horror beneath even the happiest days of our lives.

Since 7734 - hell in upside down letters - starts off with plenty of holocaust imagery, then repeatedly shoves the dancers through extreme physical acts, shoots the cast dead, torments them with bin-bags, rags and BDSM; Vardimon isn't clowning. Never mind that her dancers are the cream of the crop, and that the flexible set doubles as life guard and death camp towers. The almost relentless pain and fascism takes 7734 into Chapman Brothers dimensions of savagery. Her signature style echoes the more aggressive European choreographers, and the brutality of the content is emphasised by the brute physicality of the movements.

Between the shock and impact, Vardimon poses some uncomfortable questions - the main one being that anyone who expects art to be comforting is self-satisfied and bourgeois. Beyond this, she questions the very use of the holocaust as an appropriate subject: in order for the event to be understood, it has to be related to the observer's own life, becoming an allegory for something personal. And yet, in doing this, the observer demeans the immensity and specificity of the horror. It's a vicious double-bind, and perhaps a deeper meaning of hell than the parade of tortures and atrocities.

Unapologetic, determined, ferocious, savage, ugly even as it is elegant, switching between individual acts of technical brilliance and group work of detailed precision, repetitious, uncompromising; 7734 eventually devours itself in its own rage, challenging art to be something more than a pretty ornament to human inhumanity.