Empire Theatre, Eden Court, 7 October 2008

Pennies From Heaven (photo Andrew Ross)

THERE WAS an eager hum of anticipation as the houselights went down – I was not the only person in the audience who was there because Stephen Petronio had chosen Radiohead’s music for his commission for Scottish Ballet, Ride the Beast.

I discovered that there are similarities to seeing a film based on a favourite book – the urge to shout, “No, that’s not what it looks like” was almost irresistible, particularly during ‘Idioteque’, where Petronio fumbled the contrast between the uncompromisingly hard staccato, textured rhythm structure and the fragile, plaintive vocals.

As the grace and precision of Scottish Ballet’s dancers was wasted on yet another series of unimaginative jetés, I waited with increasing impatience for something new from this choreographer, widely lauded as innovative and ground-breaking.

Alas, it wasn’t until the fifth segment, set to ‘The National Anthem’ from Kid A, that the interesting shapes and lifts given to an intricately intertwined trio, offset by the stillness of four white-clad dancers, and the final group, silhouetted against the fading backlight, hinted at the qualities which underpin Petronio’s reputation.

The minimal set was perfect and perfectly simple, costume designs by Benjamin Cho used feathers of elegant drapery and skeletal corset lacing like bleached bones to create an effect not dissimilar to a partially decomposed body – and a great deal lovelier than that sounds – and the lighting by Ken Tabachnik was unobtrusively classy.

Trisha Brown, doyenne of American dance, was for many years Petronio’s teacher and mentor, but her piece, For MG: The Movie was as shockingly innovative today as when first seen in 1991. Originally made in silence, it was later given a soundscape by Alvin Curran, one apparently designed to test the audience’s endurance to the limits.

Catalogue your least favourite noises – the buzzing of a fly trapped inside a window, a dog barking and barking, a piano being tuned – and mix them together at random and full volume. The initial movement, a dancer circling the stage, repeated and repeated almost unbearably until interrupted by a lift, whereupon the steps staggered and reversed, before repeating in slightly different patterns.

A male dancer stood, motionless, back to the audience, throughout. Other dancers, all clad in identical lycra bodysuits, came, and danced, and left, including the mesmerically feline Paul Liburd. It was, as they say, challenging, and everyone I spoke to in the interval loathed this with vehemence ranging from strong to extreme (so much so that some did not return to their seats).

And yet…. the dance itself was riveting, and magnificently performed by the company. Smokily lit in a strange, infernal coppery glow (designed by Spencer Brown), the piece had the disjointed, half-understood feeling of a dream where the full meaning is tantalisingly elusive. This is the part of the evening that will smoulder for a long time in memory and, armed with earplugs, I would happily watch it again.

Those who left early should have stayed for the frothy conceit of Ashley Page’s Pennies from Heaven, with its strong hints of Gosford Park and Atonement and faintmakingly lovely frocks by Antony McDonald in draped silk satin, crepe de chine and velvet. Duet followed duet followed duet, those by the “Upstairs” characters being pretty well interchangeable, though the “Downstairs” characters were more differentiated and provided some of the better dancing of the piece.

The advent of a sextet of cowboys moseying along the bartop broke the monotony and the choreography of the final duet (Kara McLaughlin and Jarkko Lehmus) was far more interesting and beautifully danced.

Unfortunately the stage design hovered somewhere between stylised and naturalistic with an overpoweringly distracting graphic of Marlene Dietrich on the backdrop, equally distracting backprojected videos, and a superfluous revolving door which must have been the bane of stagehands’ lives thoughout the tour.

However, like Carabosse at Aurora’s christening, I was seemingly alone in my curmudgeonliness; the audience lapped up the terpsichorean confection with relish and rewarded it with loud cheers.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

Links

• Scottish Ballet
• Eden Court Theatre