Empire Theatre, Eden Court, 24 April 2008

“NOBODY sets out to be shit”, said Vicky Featherstone, director of the National Theatre of Scotland, at the recent Creative Scotland Summit in Edinburgh. So what on earth went wrong with Curve Foundation’s The Four Seasons?

While individually highly competent, each of the eight dancers appeared to be contained within a hermetically sealed bubble, counting beats in their head, unaware of the existence of the other dancers, the proximity of the world class Edinburgh Quartet, or the presence of a near capacity audience.

There was more communication and co-ordination between the stewardesses demonstrating the emergency drill on my Ryanair flight a few days later.

It wasn’t just a matter of being under-rehearsed. Even on the first day of rehearsal there is a sense of striving towards perfection; here there was, tragically, none.

The lack of musicality might have been comprehensible had they been dancing to anything other than the precise, almost overfamiliar notes of Vivaldi’s best known work, produced with note-perfect precision by the Edinburgh String Quartet (and friends) in the orchestra pit. A class of ten-year-olds would have had no difficulty in synchronising their steps to it but even in the sashaying stamping of Henri Oguike’s ‘Summer’, these dancers were never in total unison.

This isn’t to say that the show, danced on a visual design by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed, was uniformly dreadful; there were many indications of what it could have been, which only served to underline the shortcomings of the rest. The use of John Nichol as narrator was a good way to punctuate the sections. The overture section where all eight dancers, seated on wooden chairs, moved randomly in strange ways, some reminiscent of T’ai Chi, promised well.

Removing the tabs on either side of the stage to expose the workings gave a feeling of being en plein air. Whether the lighting was designed by Kai Fischer, as printed on the flyer, or Karin Anderson, as printed in the programme, it was excellent. And the music was sublime.

But this was an evening of dance by a ten-year-old Scottish dance company. Where, oh where, was the esprit de corps?The pity of it was that, judging by a straw poll of my neighbours in the Empire Theatre, many of the audience had been drawn in by a well-designed development programme of workshops and rehearsals, and this was their first experience of dance.

Tyros or not, they were aware enough of the lack of quality before them to give the loudest applause to the Edinburgh Quartet (and friends ) who richly deserved it. They should have been on the stage.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

Links

Eden Court Theatre

Curve Foundation (site in progress)