China. Ski. Tours

I had serious doubts about this production. I mean, I love David Hughes Dance - when they upset everyone else at the 2011 Fringe with Last Orders, I could not see what the fuss was all about. Didn't the critics know that Al Seed was likely to indulge his fascination with the dark side? Are dancers twitching like insects really that surprising? Wouldn't a degree of revulsion be expected in a piece about cannibalism? And unlike a great deal of dance, which aims for the "abstract and beautiful" vote, Hughes was making a stand for dance that, like, was actually about something. Last Orders was funny, even kitsch during the disco scene, intense and articulate.

So, it isn't some beef with the company that worried me: it was the subject. Charles Bukowski. Like most overly-intellectual boys who are scared of women, I had my Bukowski phase. I was in my twenties, got hold of a copy of Post Office and decided that the true writer would avoid the bohemian life. I got a job cleaning in a hospital, wrote HANK on my name tag and bemoaned my ugliness.

Only I stopped short when I saw him fighting his wife in a documentary, and realised that severe alcoholism might encourage a taut writing style but also ends up in writing the same bloody book for forty years. Bukowski was a thuggish man, and all that bullshit about the beauty of his soul (every time he gets a fuck, the woman seems to comment on it. And the size of his prick) could not disguise the savagery of his attitude to women.

Much as I enjoyed the quality of Grid Iron's take on the Bukowski legend - especially thanks to David Paul Jones' piano magic - an unfortunate programme note that suggested Bukowski loved women, really, soured me on the deal. In Barflies, he breaks a woman's arm. That isn't loving women in a special way.

I needed to be persuaded that David Hughes' Chinaski Sessions was not going to make the same mistakes. Luckily, and this is one of the reasons that I love David Hughes Dance, they set me up with the choreographer.

Kylie Walters had already written an essay on why she wanted to do this show, and I'll be ripping that off later. However, she was willing to clarify for me why Bukowski could be redeemed by dance.

"Bukowski's writing comes from a very masculine perspective, some would even say a misogynistic perspective," she admits. "That interested me, firstly in the obvious sense that I was a woman working with an all male cast." 

To be honest, that had struck me: Hughes had pulled together a fairly impressive gang of seven- especially given that twelve of Scotland's top male dancers has been recruited for Deliberance. Jack Webb, Rob Heaslip, Michael Sherrin, Matthew Foster and Martin Lindinger are all creators in their own right. 

"But it's also a poetic analogy for the phenomena that heavy rock music often has a predominately male audience," she continues. "And the dance world has a predominately female following. That social cleavage already creates a tension."

Chinaski was the name of the hero in Bukowski's various novels: a thinly veiled ersatz version of the author and deeply unpleasant human being. Using that name, rather than the novelist's, suggests that Walters is not interested in autobiography but something more theoretical. 

 "I've taken the Chinaski reference merely as a springboard to explore masculine behaviour in a rock context," she agrees. "The piece is inspired more by the atmosphere of Chinaski's flat rather than the poetry or stories of Bukowski."

."This theatrical foundation provides the stamping ground for a range of male, and sometimes "cock rock" behaviour, be it testosterone fuelled spurts of energy, the simple joys of a bunch of guys hanging out together, the lethargy coupled with brewing aggression or the primitive urge to compete and egg one another on."

This is intriguing me. Obviously, I don't spend that much time with other guys - at least not in large groups. That's partially because I am a loner who doesn't wash enough, but  like to say it is because I am not enamoured of how masculinity works in groups. It's how wars start, or something. However, Waters is using the male cast not to praise masculine swagger but examine it.

"What interests me here is that all this male energy is used and channelled to create something - rock," she continues. "Something about the chemistry of hanging out and playing together spurs on a creative act. It's almost a ritualistic playing out of masculinity in order to access that creative territory." 

Hmm. I've only managed to cut an paste bits from her first two replies, and I am already interested, and willing to throw away my doubts. I guess some people will see Chinaski in the title and think it's cool... but I feel that they might be getting a little more than they expected.

Now touring, and reaching The Arches in November