Empire Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 30 October 2012

FIREFLIES in the rainforest, water flowing, birdsong, and a girl (Julia Robert Pares) sleeping on the leaf-strewn floor; the Jasmin Vardimon Company’s Freedom opens in an idylllic scene, an organic garden of Eden.

Freedom - Esteban Fourmi and Julia Robert Pares (photo Alastair Muir)

THE GIRL wakes, climbs to the top of a hillock and opens her arms to the sky, a classic picture of joie de vivre. However, this being a meditation by Jasmin Vardimon, nothing is quite as it seems; the hillock is alive and the sound of music – in this case, Led Zeppelin’s frenetic ‘Immigrant Song’ – suddenly overwhelms the birdsong, the lights come on and the rainforest turns out to be plastic tubing…

…and the dancers rush across the stage in a delirious wave of exuberance. Fractal repetitions of a punishing movement, whirling onto the knees and off again continues beyond what most of us would expect to be the boundary of endurance. No wonder they are all knee-padded up as this movement is the work’s motif, cropping up again and again and linking the apparently unconnected episodes of Freedom, as the eclectic soundtrack veers all the way round the musical compass from Orbison to Ono.

“I want to tell you a story” says a dancer. Gradually, one possible narrative journey becomes visible, a woman’s emotional life from Eve-like birth to white-haired (created imaginatively with shaving foam) age and death, with a Pina Bausch-like exploration of gender politics. Can men and women be in a relationship and retain their freedom? Esteban Fourmi used Pares as a surfboard in a sequence which was comic and cutting at the same time, and almost incidentally was also an inventive, imaginative, neatly executed piece of dance.

Other standout sequences include a screaming tutu’d swan, dancers shredding tights with their teeth and an artful lizard. Less successful was a slightly incongruous shadow puppet storytelling. But overall, Freedom was another example of the way Vardimon and her dancers – a formidable crew with a stunning portfolio of stamina, energy, passion and intelligence – are creating works which are among the most intelligent and impressive in the UK today.

© Jennie Macfie, 2012

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• Jasmin Vardimon
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