MODERN DANCE MICHAEL CLARK DANCE COMPANY
Tramway, Glasgow, run ended 0...
Bare breasts and the Sex Pistols — it could only be Michael Clark. Over the past 20 years. Clark has invented his own mini genre; a style of dance that pushes boundaries. dancers' abilities and audience expectations. Performed as part of Glasgow's New Territories festival. Mmm attracted a large crowd of Clark devotees. And while our reward for loyalty was perhaps not as strong as last year (the stunning 0). there was still the sense of being in the presence of greatness. Clark's choreography
demands much of his dancers. forcing
them into leg stretches and lengthy balances that would have most people in tears. In recognition of the fact that Clark himself can no longer tackle such technically complex work. his contribution was performed with wild. almost comical abandonment.
Music has always played a big part in Clark‘s creations. and Mmm was no exception. During the first half we heard Wire and the Sex Pistols. with a little Barbra Streisand thrown in. This was followed by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring after the interval. lnvariably the movement was in contrast to the music — graceful ballet arms performed to heavy rock, or angry. angular moves set against classical strings.
The late Leigh Bowery designed the costumes for the original Mmm production back in 1992, and they've stood the test of time. One costume featured nothing but fluffy sleeves to cover the dancers' modesty, while another saw Clark‘s upper body completely engulfed by a toilet. A unique outfit for a unique man.
(Kelly Apter)
REVIVAL EUROPE
Dundee Rep, Wed 4—Sat 7 Apr 0000
Reviving a play that is old enough to merit revisiting but too young to be called a classic carries a certain risk. What seemed timely and topical a decade ago might now seem tired and trite. The remarkable thing about David Creig‘s Europe. however, is that it speaks even more vividly about our world in 2007 than it did when it was first staged at the Traverse in 1994.
Greig would argue that he wasn't being prescient when he wrote about the movement of peoples on a continent riven by civil war and economic collapse. he was merely tuned in to a problem that hasn't gone away. That doesn't lessen the chill wind of recognition when we see Chris Ryman's wheeler—dealing Morocco being viciously beaten up by a disenfranchised mob for consorting with Michelle Bonnard's refugee Katia. It could be a racist attack in today's UK — or anywhere
else in today's world in political flux.
What strikes home most forcibly in Douglas Pintoul's bold. sober. strongly acted production. played out on Colin Richmond's suitably placeless set of advertising hoardings and neon lights. is the way Greig connects social disintegration with the loss of identity. All the characters in this town near the border of some unnamed country have been uprooted by forces beyond their control. but their greatest psychological wound is caused less by losing their livelihood than by having
nowhere distinctive to call home.
Perhaps Margaret Thatcher was right when she said there was no such thing as society — and this bleak place is what it looks like. (Frank Fields)
Reviews
NEW WORK STRANGERS, BABIES Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 17 Mar 000
Does our behaviour depend upon where we’re from, or where we are now? That hoary old chestnut, the nature versus nurture debate still rages on in every field of human knowledge. So it is that while it emerges quite plainly that the woman at the centre of Linda McLean’s new piece has moved from a troubled environment to a kinder psychological place, she is still treated as the girl she once was, a violent, dangerous child.
At the centre of McLean’s five short plays, which combine to make a single journey is May (Gillian Kearney), whose past crimes still haunt her at a turning point of her life. She spends a Sunday morning with her husband, visits the hospice of her ailing father, meets a man in a hotel room for masochistic sex, encounters her brother in a park and finally is intruded upon by
Theatre
social services. Each makes a contribution to a struggle less with the inner self than the perceptions of society.
Philip Howard’s production presents a complex moral tale, which finally resolves itself into an ambivalent sort of redemption. The central character uses a symbolic register, investing birds, curtains, bread and butter and other such everyday objects as points of reference and stability on her road to a better place. The narrative takes a few uneasy jumps in tone on the way, and there’s a general sense that some of McLean’s scenes, for all their underlying darkness, might have been exploited for their humour in the production, but it is a pleasing sort of piece at its completion. Kearney shows plenty of bravery with the complex poetic rhythms of McLean’s text, and if there are hitches here and there, she’s generally strong, and well supported, particularly by Liam Brennan’s decent, slightly frustrated husband and Sean Scanlon’s curmudgeonly father.
(Steve Cramer)
if) (‘9 Ma: :Xit‘.‘ THE LIST 81