Image courtesy of Traverse.
Dreamers and Process Day
Traverse Theatre
Run Ended
Scottish Dance Theatre, a company boasting thirty years of experience, gave elating performances of two entirely different dances: Dreamers, choreographed by Anton Lachky, and Process Day, choreographed by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. The two shows, both vastly different in style and approach gave incredible value for money as the audience appreciated the remarkably malleable skill of the dancers in just two short hours.
The first dance, Dreamers, blurred many boundaries in a high-speed chaos of movement. The dancers, clothed in ‘everyday’ costumes on a crisp white stage, darted across the space in a series of frenzied movements that represented their subconscious. It encompassed a series of juxtapositions: those between humour and seriousness, between the real and surreal, the calm and crescendo, and the singular and collective. The show delivered high intensity, enigmatic performances set perfectly to a collection of classical works by Bach, Verdi, Hadyn, Chopin and Vanhal. With only five minutes remaining, the music stopped abruptly to be replaced by a silent routine interspersed with comedic gibberish as a kind of call and response. This was perhaps the most remarkable part of the dance that worked to both greatly comedic and genuinely commanding effect.
Separated only by a brief interval to change the set from white to black, the audience was transported fluently on to the next sensory experience. Process Day represented the subconscious in an entirely different way to Dreamers. It was animalistic, instinctive and otherworldly.
The dancers were lit singularly by white light, allowing choreographer Sharon Eyal to choose exactly what the viewer saw. Set to a dark techno score written by DJ Ori Lichtik, using music by a Berlin based collective Greco-Roman, the somewhat androgynous dancers pulsated and struggled with one another in a series of repetitive movements. Austere and sensual, this dance incited ideas of rebirth and apocalypse.
This performance gave two equally exhilarating, yet entirely different visual experiences; it was little short of phenomenal, paying homage to the genre of dance.