Article
The days of gloomy, crabbed, navel-gazing work are over
When it comes to dance, space - both physical and mental - matters, as three works at the Edinburgh festival demonstrate
Special report: the Edinburgh festival
2001
In Situ Dance Base, Grassmarket, Edinburgh
The Art of Fugue Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Double Points: 1 and 2 Playhouse, Edinburgh
Ther best new space in Edinburgh is the recently completed Dance Base in the heart of the Old Town. Built thanks to Lottery (and other) money, it is a splendid complex of studios in the shadow of the castle. Malcolm Fraser, its ingenious architect, has used the natural stone walls of the existing structure to create a building that acknowledges the bustling Grassmarket at its foot, while giving airy views of turrets and battlements above.
Sprung-floored studios lead out to terraces and gardens. Damp aromatic plants were crunched underfoot by dancers and spectators inaugurating the building, as Leah Stein's specially commissioned In Situ performance took place on its many levels. A dozen performers bounced off the walls, swung along the balconies and pounded their feet on the glass floors around the stairwell. Even in pouring rain, the place was awash with light. In future, there can be no excuse for gloomy, crabbed, navel-gazing work created in these studios.
Dance Base will house choreographers and performers of all kinds, amateur as well as professional. Visiting artists appearing in the Fringe gaze at it greedily; the main studio (occupied by Radio 3 during the Festival) will one day serve as an intimate performance space, along the lines of the Clore Studio Upstairs at the Royal Opera House. All Morag Deyes, Dance Base's visionary director, has to do is find more money for a building already over budget.
What dance in the Festival needs now is a mid-scale theatre with a large stage and good sightlines. Avant-garde choreography is ill-suited to the cavernous Playhouse or the Festival Theatre's gilt proscenium arch.
The Festival Theatre stage had to be adapted for Ballett Freiburg's The Art of Fugue, by skewing it over the orchestra pit, with part of the audience seated against the back wall as if in a basketball court. A string quartet and harpsichord player, members of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, perched to one side on the apron stage.
They played their way through Bach's fugues, largely ignoring the dancers waiting their turn on the bench along one side of the court. The casual approach let us know that Amanda Miller's choreography was not matching the formal structure of the music. Instead, the nine dancers pursued their own games, sometimes in counterpoint with each other and the baroque instruments, sometimes running, spinning and unwinding freely.
A girl isolated in a spotlight was liberated by two men, who promenaded, lifted and carried her off; a quartet split into couples and reformed as trios as others entered the fray. Once a numbers game was started, it took on its own life and logic. A dancer stopped and glared at the musicians, as if outraged that they should continue without him. Because the dance could disengage from the music, it was all too easy to start wondering what purpose the choreography served: in a music-dominated Festival, it seemed odd to watch a concert in which Bach was sidelined.
Meanwhile, down on the gloomy Playhouse stage, Emio Greco took on Ravel's Bolero singlehanded and just about survived. This was choreography as an act of defiance. Greco shuddered with the effort of resisting Bolero' s compulsive cumulations, twitching as though he were being flayed. He wears a silken shift as a protective skin, wrinkling with him as he sweats, revealing every nervous reaction.
The lighting, by Henk Danner and Greco's co-director Pieter C. Scholten, traps Greco on a flightpath, running in place as though unable to take off. He has the blind intensity of a plant striving for light or an insect shedding its chrysalis.
Ideally, you need to see him close up to register each tremor, each change of expression. He fights Ravel's repetitions almost to the end, when he simply sits and lets the climax, amplified by fireworks, explode around him. In Part II, his claustrophobic world expands to include a doppelgänger.
In last year's Festival, his shaven-head partner seemed a female clone; this time, Bertha Bermudez Pascual looks nothing like him, but even more eerily, moves identically. What seemed personal becomes objective: Greco is no longer alone, yet this total togetherness does not necessarily spell harmony.
Their weaving duet, like a mating birds' dance, is a ritual without any hint of human sex. Impossible to know how much of themselves they may be sharing, although their spell binds the audience close - an extraordinary achievement in such a huge house. All credit to Brian McMaster for programming Greco as part of the mainstream, instead of leaving him a cult phenomenon.