Dance: Within This Dust and Chaos and Contingency

Within This Dust is an example of the kind of choreography that I warmly approve. Inspired by the events of 9/11 - in particular the photographs by Richard Drew of a man falling from the building and appearing to take flight - it is determined to engage with the wider world, and has moments of dance-theatre (half acting, half dancing) that are intense, immediate and moving.

Across three pieces, Within This Dust tries to make sense of the horror of 9/11

It's no accident that Dance Base booked Smallpetitklein into their Fringe programme in both 2011 and 2012: first of all for an extract, then a return gig for the complete trilogy. Like the press release says, it "touches the intellect as well as emotion." 

Dance can be a hard sell: as a critic who unashamedly loves the form, I wonder whether my enthusiasm is being flung into an abyss of disinterest and antagonism. I could try to throw around a few cliches - how everyone dances, that the unique quality of dance is to echo the metaphorical meanings of an event, and through choreography put individual experience into a broader context. Unfortunately, I am a critic, not an academic, and while I'll badger away at the more definitive meanings - mostly through slapping up 500 words on here, or slipping a throwaway line into a review - it is the practical experience of watching dance that has captivated me. 

It's unlikely that my writing about dance will persuade anyone. But the recent triple bill by Mark Brew at Tramway, or the erotic savagery of Por Sal Y Samba at manipulate, make explicit what I am struggling to explain. Dance can engage the intellect and the emotions in a similar way to theatre, but the emphasis on movement makes it all the more visceral.

Another Scottish company, Janis Claxton Dance, invited me into the studio last week to see a rehearsal of Chaos and Contingency. Standing on the rooftop, looking into the studio (the piece has been designed to be watched from multiple angles),  I quickly realised that Claxton's choreography here was a study in how the repetition of simple gestures can evolve into an unspeakably complex weaving of dancers around the space and each other. 

This simplicity is deceptive - all of the dancers are technically accomplished, including three whom Claxton brought across from China - and the basic vocabulary owes as much to the soft sway of Tai Chi as to the rigours of either classical or Cunningham traditions. Even in this early form, the use of numbers made Chaos and Contingency something between a meditation on mathematics and the kabbalistic meanings of numerology. 

Yet unlike reading a scientific text book, it was not baffling - it encouraged me to have another crack at those formulae that give me a headache - and unlike the usual esoteric mysticism, it wasn't soft headed junk. 

Within This Dust takes on a very different theme (death, despair et al), but it shares Chaos and Contingency's ability to translate ideas into the physical realm. In different ways, both pieces affirm my faith in dance as a medium: that they have such radically different subjects, and avoid sentimentality, and that their basic approaches to movement are so different. 

Somewhere between the two comes my enthusiasm for dance. It isn't difficult to define, although definitions are always contested and can be deconstructed (dance has been described as "bodies moving in space" in an attempt to include every possible genre of dance, leaving the definition so basic as to mean nothing): but it is difficult to express. Then again, that's the whole point. If Chaos and Contingency could be fully explained in verbal language, there would be no need for the choreography. 

Thank God language is a failure.

Within This Dust Tour Dates
Wed 13 February – Woodend Barn, Banchory
Fri 1 & Sat 2 March – Center for Performance Research, New York, USA
Sat 16 March – Eastgate Centre, Peebles
Tue 19 March – Gardyne Centre, Dundee
Fri 22 March – The Brunton, Musselburgh
Sat 23 March – Birnam Centre, Dunkeld
Wed 10 April – The Riverfront, Newport
Fri 12 April – Square Chapel, Halifax
Thu 18 April – The Palace Theatre, Kilmarnock
Wed 1 & Thu 2 May – Aberystwyth Arts Centre

Chaos and Contingency Tour Dates

Saturday 2 & Sunday 3 March
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
in association with Tramway
Midday and 2pm
FREE

Saturday 16 March
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Presented by Citymoves Dance Agency as part of March Moves in association with Aberdeen Art Gallery
Midday and 2pm
FREE

Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 March
National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
in association with Edinburgh International Science Festival and National Museums Scotland
1:00pm and 3:00pm
FREE

Five for Daphne

Last year, Daphne and I were the coolest editorial team on The Fringe. We had help from Mark Harding, I guess, but The Shimmy Skinny was embodied by the pair of us, looking so similar, stomping about and arguing about the art. This year, you are in Cyprus and I miss you. But you'd get a kick from these shows.

I blew your mind by sending you to Turandot by Polish mavericks NeTTheatre. They are rocking Summerhall, but I have talked about them too much for one week: instead, let's go with one of my favourite books, now adapted for the stage. Varieties of Religious Experience might have something to do with a study that tried to categorise different mystical states, but comedian Adam Strauss has translated it into an hour that celebrates the potential of drugs.

Apparently, all the stories he tells are true, from falling in love with a PhD student to hanging out with the chemical underground. Inspired by the use of mushrooms as a treatment for OCD, Strauss wants to share his psychedelic wisdom.

The Royal Mile Tavern, 4 -25 August @ 6.10pm, Free

You remember that night we went to the overlong cabaret at the Sapphire Rooms last year, and how uncomfortable I was after the show ended? This year, there is a site-specific performance piece in the lap dancing club. It's like they copied that fictional review I wrote one time.

I had the poor lad from Cathartic Connections on the Radio Show yesterday, and gave him such a hard time about the venue, I felt guilty. But he did well: they justified the location by the content of Gob Shop, and he came across as appropriately ambivalent about the way that lap dancing has a presence in contemporary society.
Cathartic Connections are a young company, based in Glasgow and are devising their own pieces, using their skills. It happens that one of them has striptease skills, yet this insist that they are trying to break down the stereotypes. The whole sounds dark rather than decadent, and might answer some of the questions we had about the Sapphire's usual order of business.

The Sapphire Rooms, 7 -25 August

Next two from Dance Base: Curious Seed are back, this time they are The Woman Who Wants to be Funny. I've been shouting about this one ever since I saw the preview in Tramway, and now it is hooked up with A Corpo Libero - a show which, according to Lorna Irvine's Skinny review, gives new meaning to the phrase "bingo wings". It's Luke and Chris together again - they've been working together since the NTS introduced them - but they are also doing a three hour improvisation session on Tuesday. It's free and you'll get to dance along to Luke's magical musical, throw some shapes and watch me sit in the corner doing a live blog. Beat that!

Dance Base, 14 August @ 1pm

Remember the rows we had over hip-hop, and how you scored that interview with Flawless? You remember them - they were the big dance show last year. And you became their pal (and East End Cabaret... everybody loved you. I guess it made up for me being grumpy and sulky). Countryboy's Struggle is my hip hop theatre choice for you: a one man show that's all about the rap, and a tale of a boy from Cornwall trying to make it in London. That's a big like you coming from Cyprus to Glasgow, isn't it?

Anyhow, Countryboy himself tells the whole thing, through the medium of the rhyming couplet (mostly), throws a few freestyles and learns that perhaps the whole community thing isn't so great after all. Writer and performer Maxwell Golden is all over the raps, he worked with the Mighty Jonzi D and I reckon that hip hop theatre is the one thing that the UK gave back to the culture. Oh, apart from grime.

Golden has been touring the gig round the country, old church halls, regional theatres, so he's got the old story-telling skills off pat. It's not just about the rapping, there's compassion hidden behind the fronting.

He did a special video so you could see it, too. 

Pleasance Courtyard, 10-17 August @ 2.35pm 

Last choice - but there is so much you love. I am missing your company and this blog - and all the fun of the Fringe hardly makes up for it...

One more from Dance Base. Smallpetitklein did part of Within This Dust last year - the bit where Tom Pritchard fleshed out the truth behind Richard Drew's picture of the Falling Man from the Twin Towers. This version is longer, has Pritchard, a duet, and has had audiences sat in compelled, moved silence. As we so often said, dance expresses the emotions that transcend language.

Dance Base, 7 -19 August @ 6.30pm