Those Dogs Want More

Once I gave up on completing my article on Pavlova's Dogs - I like to think that sudden endings are charmingly reticent, rather than betraying my lack of motivation - I decided to find a few images to illustrate the piece. Unfortunately, I chanced about a few reviews of Pavlova's Dogs which were not exactly in disagreement with me, but seemed to think that giving the work a rating - or using phrases like "it's quite a lively ride" - is still the best way to write a critique. Puzzling over a choreography, poking around at the ideas, or having some smart-arse interpretation, is oddly unfashionable.

It only took a paragraph of venting for me to feel better. I accept that those reviews have a right to exist, and are probably quite helpful as part of the general discussion around dance.

No, no they are not. If Pavlova's Dogs has any worth, apart from keeping a dozen people off the streets and giving audiences cheap laughs at bunny ears, the critique has to engage with the ideas that the choreographer was addressing. So, rather than name and shame the reviewer who has so displeased me, I had better get back to writing.

Rachel Lopez de la Nieta is fascinated by the undercurrent of cruelty that exists in ballet. Her fairy tale - told by a man who might represent the patriarchy, or just be a rather bitchy type - echoes the romance of classical ballet's stories, but is explicitly unpleasant towards the heroines. Then the dancers are accused of being fat. They are dressed simply, and their dances are increasingly contorted as the fairy tale gets more vicious. One of them argues with the man who might represent the patriarchy. She is placated.

Add to this the brief programme notes that claim that it "is partly inspired by some of the early experiments in psychology" where certain ethics were questionable". Lopez de la Nieta is drawing a direct analogy between the torture of dogs to find out how instinct could be manipulated, and the training of ballet dancers.

Nipping back to my thoughts on Streetcar, which included an unease about the physical state of some dancers, I am inclined to think that the playful veneer of PDs is less interesting than the implied attack on ballet's ability to ruin lives and turn women into mere bodies. This is a long way from the post-modern dance of Trisha Brown, which focusses on breaking down existing possibilities of choreographic movement.

Revolving Pavlova

Scottish Dance Theatre's Drift (choreographed by James Wilton, starring a bruising track by Nine Inch Nails) is one of those pieces that gives "contemporary dance" a good name. It's a classic pas de deux format - sexy, bursts of technical brilliance, thumping yet emotive soundtrack - with a few added touches that separate it from ballet. Specifically, it is melancholic and the dancers play trust games - and the dancer's moves and gestures are spikier, more aggressive.

At only ten minutes, Drift can either stop the show or act as a juicy bonus. No wonder it has held its place alongside Kate Weare's Lay Me Down Safe on SDT's latest touring triple bill: and it acts as a comfort blanket before the finale of Rachel Lopez de la Nieta's experiment on Pavlova's Dogs.

At this point, I have a bad feeling I am about to shame myself by trying to use Big Theories. I am thinking post-modernism, contrasting popular ideas about what it is ("everything is relative, man"), a slightly more rigorous definition ("there is no central narrative, and everything is relative, human") and dance's specific movement (the Judson Memorial Church, buddy).

Because to call both Drift and Pavlova's Dogs "contemporary dance" seems absurd. I am not even sure if  PDs is even dance (not that that's a bad thing). It asks questions about the nature of dance - thankfully, it gets beyond "what is dance?" quickly and has a few pokes at ballet mythology. There's music and the two guys do a bit of "entertainment" (tops off, rocking out to Fleetwood Mac, or dressed as bunnies and camping it up to Flanagan and Allen). There are even four female dancers making shapes that would not disgrace the choreography of -well, Kate Weare or James Wilton.

Yet the main feature of PDs appears to be the chatter of two guys. It is their argument that creates the dramatic tension, their ideas that dictate the pace. Lopez de la Nieta works closely with a dramaturge, Henrietta Hale. Unlike Scottish Ballet's Streetcar, where the dramaturge seemed to just encourage the choreography's theatricality, it feels as if Pavlova's Dogs would be as comfortable as a theatre company's production.

None of these things are necessarily bad, unless I am trying to insist that rigid categories are more important than an art-form's flexibility in the face of an artist's vision. It's probably important to Lopez de la Nieta's intentions that the usual conventions of dance are so easily disassembled, and since her own training was in classical ballet (at least at first), it's as if she is working through both personal and public stereotypes of "the dancer".

It would probably be better to simply call it "performance", but that denies the importance of the dance conventions that the choreographer aims to deconstruct. And I can't call it post-modern dance: although it conforms to the more rigorous definition two above, it lacks, except in limited sequences, the precise strictures that came out of the Judson Memorial Church crew ("task-based" movement, fiddling about with the gaze of the dancer, rejection of virtuosity).

Here's the real post-modern magic of Pavlova's Dogs: it is never fixed, and any attempt at definition causes the definition to slip away, like the last pea on the plate, chased by the critical fork.