@ Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, on Sat 5 Mar 2016
Phoenix Dance Theatre celebrate their 35th anniversary with a Triple Bill of revitalised, recent and brand-new dance works. Rather than presenting a showcase of the well tried and tested from their back catalogue, they show their continued commitment to taking programming risks, with this interesting and eclectic selection of contemporary dance.
Itzik Galili’s Until.With/Out.Enough is one of those rare moments where dance, design, music and space lock together to produce something genuinely whole. A snapshot at any point would reveal a perfect tableau: the flawless juxtaposition of form and light. The dancers perform this faultlessly, the trajectory of the movements precise and carefully in concordance with the music. It is truly enthralling to watch, and has a sort of calisthenic beauty to it, its group order punctuated by brief moments of unexpected individuality.
Undivided Loves, a new work by Kate Flatt, provides a welcome contrast to the pace of Galili’s piece. However, despite the continued high quality of the dancing, the choreography is pulled well out of focus by the aimless and drifting music. This is not helped by the peculiar production values of the latter’s recording, with its poorly recorded recitation and overly close-miked instruments. It ends with a melange of multi-national voices, which is far too much of a cliché to result in anything but a weak conclusion.
The final work in tonight’s programme, Bloom, choreographed by Caroline Finn, is a series of short, surreal episodes bound together by an omnipresent masked outsider. There is a transgressive energy about Bloom—the same slightly dark undercurrent that seems to come with fairy-tales, circuses and peep-shows—that makes the audience’s voyeuristic stance explicit.
Despite the various clever devices employed to weave Bloom’s sections together, it still ends up quite loose-knit, relying on the energy of its dancers for its success. However, as with the rest of the programme, the dancers do really own this work, bringing its wit and quirky vitality to a rolling boil.
Although tonight’s Triple Bill is not uniformly successful, it is a programme that wants to push boundaries, and this is surely to be applauded. With such an excellent creative team working together with such phenomenal dancers, this is exactly the sort of work Phoenix Dance Theatre should continue to produce.
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