Edinburgh Festival Theatre, and touring January 2010

Paisley Patter - dancers Lyndsey Thomas, Errol White and Davina Givens (photo - Andy Ross)

A MUSICIAN strikes up a Scottish melody on his squeezebox. Instead of joining in with some appropriate ceilidh moves, the nearest dancer tries out his best body-popping shapes. The audience laughs at the juxtaposition, but it is more than just an easy gag. This moment in Frank McConnell’s 15-minute Innit . . . Innat – sums up the mix-and-match spirit of the whole Off Kilter show.

Produced for Edinburgh’s Hogmanay and now touring Scotland, including a run at Eden Court, the variety-style performance is a celebration of Scottish dance that does everything it can to wriggle free of defining Scottishness. There is room on this stage for the music of Franz Ferdinand and Beethoven, for ceilidh dancing and hip hop, for football and The White Heather Club.

Look carefully at the traditional costumes of the Indian dancers and you’ll spot a tartan pleat. Like the country itself, Off Kilter lives with the past but embraces the present.

Full marks, therefore, for not taking the Riverdance route to cultural cliché. All the same, the show could do with being less timid about the tradition it is upturning. To begin the show with a single piper and a lone dancer – former Highland world champion Davina Givens – is half-hearted, neither spectacular nor subversive, and you have to wait until the end, when the audience is invited to join in a Dashing White Sergeant, to get the rush of communal energy at which Scottish traditional dancing excels.

It doesn’t help that Givens leaves the stage not for some gob-smacking alternative to the traditional, but for an indifferent piece of aerial dance. Choreographer Jennifer Patterson surely has a lovely time twisting round her silks, but if it weren’t for Tom Bancroft’s powerful score, it would be dull for the rest of us.

Things look more promising with Ihayami, in which choreographer Priya Shrikumar marries Indian moves to Scottish rhythms. In theory, it is a fascinating collision, one that makes illuminating connections across continents and epitomising the production’s eclecticism. In practice, however, it is only during a sequence of traditional Indian drumming that the dance takes on real definition.

It’s not the only time among the ten contributions when the idea is better than the execution. Andrew Howitt’s Gemmill’s Goal, for example, looks more like a warm-up exercise than a recreation of Archie Gemmill’s famous football triumph. We enjoy the novelty of dancers dressed as footballers, but are let down by a goal that never seems to happen.

It means the success of Off Kilter relies heavily on the two stand-out pieces: Ashley Page’s Paisley Patter, a restless, twisting contemporary dance set to the quirky rhythms of Ivor Cutler; and Mark Morris’s Cease Your Funning, a taut, tender and sometimes funny ballet set to Beethoven. In execution and imagination, they are in their own league and make the show both more uneven and all the more worth seeing.

© Mark Fisher, 2010

Links

• Off Kilter
• Eden Court Theatre
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog