Tron, Glasgow, and touring 2007

RISK performed by YDance.

“NOTHING VENTURED, nothing gained,” goes the aphorism. It’s sound advice if you’re grown-up and well-off. But when you’re a teenager with indifferent parents and bullying classmates, it’s a lot more ambiguous. For young people to venture into the world means getting to grips with a complex balance sheet of advantage and risk. With some ventures, you stand to lose more than you gain.

“It was a bigger risk to be sober than to be drunk,” says one of the young women in John Retallack’s excellent dance-theatre show for teenagers, mounted by YDance (formerly Scottish Youth Dance Theatre) and Company of Angels in association with the MacRobert Centre in Stirling, and well recommended for adults too.

Faced with pressure from her peers, the girl realises it’s safer to go with the hard-drinking crowd and hold onto her friends than to enjoy an abstemious night on the dance floor and be ostracised.

One of the strengths of Retallack’s play is it doesn’t gloss over the real dilemma here. At heart it carries a liberal, be-true-to-yourself message, but it is honest in its acknowledgement of the joys of going too far.

“I got a rush even though it hurt so much,” says one boy amid a collage of stories about jumping from high windows, racing stolen cars, spray painting trains, playing chicken on the motorway and drinking to excess. They know the risks, and the risks seem worth it.

All the while, in a series of comic choruses, the play reminds us that the alternatives to risk are not the answer either. If we lived our lives to the letter of health and safety legislation, locking the doors to a frightening outside world of rapists and paedophiles, cocooning ourselves in the backseats of our parents’ cars, we’d not really be living at all.

By juxtaposing the alternatives – inertia versus recklessness, safety versus experience – RISK makes us question where the balance should lie.

It’s the dramatic ambiguity and the emotional honesty that give the play its head and heart. More than that, it’s staged with considerable polish on a bare stage on which the five actors perform Andy Howitt’s punchy choreography, influenced by hip hop and world styles, in and around Retallack’s fragmentary script.

The result is an energised show with five high-precision performances from Paul J Corrigan, Martin Docherty, Michelle Edwards, Annmarie Fulton and Edward McGurn, who bring a physical dynamism to match the youthful vigour of the script.

(Risk can be seen at Lossiemouth High School on 16 February, and The Badenoch Centre, Kingussie, on 17 February)

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• YDance