Les Ballets C de la B 2007, the moment I fell in love

In its twenty year history, Les Ballets C de la B has built a reputation for being both accessible and experimental. The two works performed at Tramway this month - VSPRS and Import/Export - demonstrated their broad range and expressiveness.

Both pieces explore marginalised experience. VSPRS examines the meeting between mental illness and religious ecstasy without patronising, while Import/Export speaks of immigration and alienation. If VSPRS is more visceral - dancers climb across the set, and emerge from the audience - Import/Export addresses more immediate concerns in an intimate and moving manner. Where VSPRS is an acrobatic and exhausting showcase, Import/Export is a chamber piece.

VSPRS is inspired by a psychedelic re-imagining of Monteverdi's baroque Marian Vespers and agitated movement copied from film of psychiatric patients. Rapidly creating a basic dance vocabulary of discomfort and twitch, the company simulates the approach of an overwhelming vision: equal parts holy and painful, it is a masterful exposition of dance's ability to transmit emotions that defy language or rationality. The music swaggers to a repetitious, swirling climax as the gypsy musicians wander the stage; the dancers are convulsed by sexual pulses, looking anxiously out at the audience, panting and groaning for release. It comes, followed by an awesome stillness and silence, leaving the audience to wonder how a theatrical performance can generate such a numinous presence. Even rapturous applause is dwarfed by the sense of awe.

Import/Export is a more conventional series of dances, fleshing out the lives of immigrants through violent ensembles and slapstick. Lazara Rosell Albear's performance is especially poignant, juxtaposing funky disco alongside conventional contemporary poses, as the victim of Koen Augustijen's racist lust: Juan Benitez provides a comic monologue to soften the harshness of the subtext of bullying and sexual assault that underlie the spectacular acrobatics. More contained than VSPRS, it transforms its provocative passion into subtle reflection. 

Les Ballets C de la B are possibly the most exciting company working in Europe at this time: capable of breaking boundaries and using dance as a tool for the communication of complex ideas without disappearing into the abstract. 

Five Performances for a Post-Referendum Scotland

Audience (Ontroerend Goed)
Many critics got upset because the company abused a plant in the crowd, missing the subsequent deconstruction of 'the manufacture of consent' and dismissing the Belgians as shock-tactic nihilists. The last half hour, however, demonstrates how easy mass manipulation can be, and the problems that 'doing the right thing' can bring to anyone who mistakes observation as passivity.

Bloody Mess (Forced Entertainment)
The show that will keep Forced Entertainment on the syllabus of University Theatre Studies until the subject is finally rolled up into the Faculty of Neo-Darwinian Analysis, Bloody Mess  is a glorious fusion of many themes and competing ideas. One especially powerful strand is the gradual revelation that apparent communication is, in fact, just the juxtaposition of individuals following their own journey and accidently bumping into each other. Plenty is said, but no dialogue ever emerges. 

Fall (Zinnie Harris)
Apparently, in the navy, when the tempest rages and men are swept

overboard or eaten by a giant squid, a wily old jack tar will mumble: 'never mind, worse things happen in a Zinnie Harris play.' Miserable dystopias are cheap in theatre, ever since Beckett got chuckles from Godot: it is Harris' attention to detail and broad poetic scope that lift her apocalypses above the mundane. Dominic Hill's direction often found the beauty in the brutality, and Fall's finale renders the end of the world... delicate.

Jesus, Queen of Heaven (Jo Clifford)
Remember how I bang on about the hermeneutical spiral? This is a good reminder of how the event (in this case, the claims for the incarnation of the Judeo-Christian God) is given meaning by the process of rereading and recontextualisation. Note: does not contain fundamentalism.

VSPRS (Les Ballets C de la B)
This rarely needs a reason to be included, but... like Bloody Mess, it has strands to spare and the way that the awkward, the physically unique and the other are capable of moving towards an ecstatic moment of unity probably make it the one of the most vivid and visceral expression of the holiness of all human life (at least in the tradition of European contemporary dance). Plus it had Iona Kewney in it, and a gypsy band playing psychedelic versions of Monteverdi.