Macphail Centre, Ullapool, 26 October 2010

NO ORCHESTRA and no orchestra pit between audience and performers, not even a stage – it was a rare treat to get this close to the action with Scottish Ballet.

Thanks to a French tourist who thought a fairly well signposted drive was a parking space, this reviewer was late arriving in Ullapool and is thus sadly unable to report on Diana Loosmore’s Chasing Ghosts, but managed to slip in just in time for recently departed soloist Paul Liburd’s choreographic debut for Scottish Ballet.

From Where was an accomplished work of precision for four dancers. There have been times in the past when it has looked as though some of the company have been mouthing the body language of contemporary dance without really understanding it, but in this piece they were fluent speakers, inhabiting the movements completely, perfectly attuned to each other.

It’s not the easiest transition from dancing works to making them on other dancers but on the strength of this piece, it is to be hoped that Liburd will persevere.

The programme was a bit of a sampler of dance styles, and this very modern piece was followed by Erik Cavallari and Sophie Martin with the Balcony Pas de Deux from Krzysztof Pastor’s Romeo and Juliet, reviewed at Eden Court in May this year.

The audience, mostly P4-P7s, were as hushed as an audience of that age is ever going to be as Prokofiev’s rich music flowed over them. The two dancers flowed across the stage in the lyric, ecstatic movements of first love – but the audience must have been impressed by the effort, usually hidden by distance, that goes into creating ballet’s seemingly effortless grace.

Seeing this duet on its own was a chance for this reviewer to appreciate the choreography, somewhere between the full-on classical of Petipa and modern dance, and to revel in the quality of Cavallari and Martin’s dancing without the distraction of sets, plots and other characters; in other words, a real treat.

Sophie Laplane and the Company in Ashley Page's Pennies from Heaven. Photograph by Andrew Ross.

After the interval, some extracts from Ashley Page’s Pennies From Heaven went down very well. On first reviewing this (Oct 2008) I was not overly enamoured of the work as a whole.

The effect of duet after duet with scarcely any leavening of chorus work is like eating a whole meal made up of nothing but desserts, initially attractive but eventually unsatisfying, though it was lovely to be able to appreciate much that was missed in the distraction of the whole work, for example, Erik Cavallari and Adam Blyde’s partnering skills.

Pennies from Heaven is a crowd-pleaser, no doubt about it, but by venturing into a territory so memorably occupied by Fred Astaire, Page invites comparisons with that consummate master of style, and despite the undoubtedly superior technical skills of Scottish Ballet’s dancers, the work does not quite stand up to the perfect simplicity of Astaire & Rogers in, say, Top Hat.

But such a stylistic quibble is not important in the context of Up Close. The audience was in no hurry to leave the Macphail, turning around and chatting animatedly about the experience, faces alight, minds stimulated. Exposing our youngsters to performing arts of this quality, extending their horizons and inspiring them – that’s important, and in that this programme more than succeeded.

© Jennie Macfie, 2010

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