Quite A' Right

 

Scottish Dance Theatre are the hardest working company in Caledonian Contemporary Choreography. Not content with an annual Fringe run, they hit the touring trail relentlessly, showcasing the work of up-and-coming artists like Ben Duke (The Life and Times of Girl A) and integrated dance genii Marc Brew and Caroline Bowditch. The double bill at Tramway achieves the golden double of using radical approaches to the nature of dance – plenty of European style chat to the audience – while remaining accessible and narrative driven.

The deserved plaudits for Girl A are often directed at Solene Weinachter’s charismatic central performance, or Duke’s witty asides on how dance can tell a story. But the content is as profound as the style and technical excellence. Moments of heart-break, the anxiety of sexual desire, the feeling of loneliness that seems almost inevitable at a party: Duke captures these with a mixture of funky moves, evocative film and self-questioning monologues. It is a brilliant example of physical theatre, comfortable making humorously ironic on dance’s expressiveness and picturing interior turmoil. The final sequence, when Girl A whole-heartedly enters back into the flow of life, is a robust riposte to the tortured, romantic artist and critic. Dance has never felt so appropriate as a metaphor for life itself.

NQR is even more meditative, although the presence of Caroline Bowditch ensures moments of cheeky comedy. Artistic director regards NQR as a step towards a fully integrated dance process: the choreographic imagination of former Australian Ballet boy Marc Brew cuts across clichés about disablement. Alongside Bowditch and Janet Smith, Brew has crafted a satire on the tyranny of categorisation and measurement. Alternating powerful sequences of choral movement and longer rambles around the medical, and artistic, contours of control, NQR offhandedly celebrates difference and professional technique.

Unfortunately, NQR and Girl A have completed their rounds of Scotland: concluding a tour at Tramway, now home to the Scottish Ballet (and a separate visual art and performance programme) serves as a reminder that Scotland has two national companies, and that SB could do well to look to their Dundonian contemporaries for both quality and seriousness of outreach.