EDINBURGH FESTIVAL REVIEWS
Dance Love Cycle King’s Theatre Mary Brennan *****
LOVE hurts. In OCD Love, created by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar for their L-E-V company in 2016, the emotional turmoil of romantic yearning is complicated by the tics and dictats of obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Love Chapter 2, which Eyal choreographed in 2017, pushes that turmoil to fresh, and anguishing, extremes: whatever the relationship once was, it’s now over and the aftermath is a maelstrom of fixated hopes and excoriating disappointment.
Each piece is securely self-contained, each piece carries its own unnerving charge of humanity at bay within its own irrationally- beleaguered skin.
But seen together in succession, under the umbrella title Love Cycle, viscerally heightens the impact of Eyal’s insights about OCD, and intensifies the agitated physicality she devises to convey the uncontrollable, unrelenting spasms of repetitive behaviour. You watch, forced to admire these works in all their wrenching hyperactivity while inwardly wincing.
The same five dancers perform in both pieces, to electronic soundscores (by Ori Lichtik) that generate degrees of insistent pulses or sudden surges of melody that – in Love Chapter Two – bursts into a Latino song. The dancers surrender to it with a blissful hip-sway sequence, that is lushly hypnotic. Earlier percussive rhythms had sent them into militaristic marching mode or, as the beats altered, propelled limbs into oddly gawky flailings as if inner impulses were short-circuiting. Costumes – black for OCD Love, grey for Love Chapter 2 – were brief and basic: every forward thrust of belly, deeparching back bend or jutting rump was exposed as the dancers veered from strutting as a pack, to jittering and jerking in isolation. Some angularities were robotic, other moves hinted at shimmying social overtures, but at every turn the pace, like the exacting choreography, was pulverising. Love Cycle is an astonishing tour-de-force. You feel the pain.
Music London Symphony Orchestra Usher Hall, Edinburgh Keith Bruce *****
IT ALMOST seemed less of a surprise that Sir Simon Rattle should embark on Mahler’s vast Ninth Symphony without a score in front of him on Saturday than it had done that he had the whole of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances in his head the previous evening.
These two concerts saw the return of the conductor to the Festival for the first time since 2006 with the Berlin Phil, and although his is one of those names that will always immediately be associated with the big stuff, these two evenings seemed designed to show the immense range of the man, especially in partnership with this orchestra.
The Mahler was astonishing. At its conclusion, he was indicating every individual note to the players, which did not seem fussy in the least. There, and earlier, the attention-grabbing quietness and concentration they brought to the music was utterly remarkable. Intensity, yes, but also something more spiritual – and that Adagio was just the end of the story. In the second movement, Rattle had asked for, and won, an entirely different style of robust gypsy style of performance, the edge to the playing of the winds including some splendidly rustic bassoon.
The bold shapes of the central movements of the Mahler were entirely of a piece with the performance of the Dvorak and Janacek’s Sinfonietta on Friday. The LSO may be elite musicians but there is also always a crucial element of showbiz there – the line of nine extra trumpets in the organ gallery required for the Janacek is the sort of thing you expect to see from them.
The flash of a “Pops” orchestra is in the mix, and was to the fore for the well-loved melodies on that concert’s second half. The first was in partnership with Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman for Bernstein’s Auden-inspired
Symphony No.2 The Age Of Anxiety, fulfilling the soloist’s promise to the composer that he would play it for his 100th birthday. From its haunting twin-clarinet opening to the sweeping urban landscape of its conclusion, it is a daunting, vast and complex work for all involved, the audience not excepted.
Zimerman was superb – and never more than on the Art Tatum-like lightning-fingered jazzy section – and Rattle clearly revelled in the challenge of communicating this big, tricky work.
Dance Autobiography Festival Theatre Mary Brennan ****
FOR choreographer Wayne Mcgregor, the sequencing of his own genome was a beginning: in the studio, with his dancers, he used the genome’s structure – 23 pairs of chromosomes – as the springboard for a work that would filter life experiences, memories, sounds and significant artefacts into 23 discrete episodes. You don’t need to know any of this, or the other scientific factors that are still influencing Autobiography on a nightly basis. Just.watch.the.dance. Take on board the shifting intricacies of the design elements Lucy Carter’s lighting,
Ben Cullen Williams’s riseand-fall metalwork grid - that keep redefining the space around the dancers. Register how Jlin’s electronic score varies its colours like a chameleon on speed, pounding out frenetic beats or lulling down to almosttwee schmaltz according to the mood implied in the title of each section.
Every performance opens with Avatar, in which a lone male dancer travels the stage in a solo that flows and shifts like a stream of consciousness, pliant limbs wheeling into spins or taking a leap into a universe that is, intrinsically, Mcgregor’s own cosmos. The 15 randomly-selected vignettes on Saturday included “ageing”, “nature” and “lucent” – this latter was an exquisite male duet, touched with an unhurried tenderness that brilliantly counterpointed other scenarios where fleet feet burned up the floor while bodies morphed into anglepoise mode and ricocheted from one gymnastic configuration to another.
At times, there were fleeting echoes of Mcgregor’s own dancing days when his long, pale body twisted and stretched with an improbable elasticity. Moments, too, when the choreography reflects his curiousity about neural networks, new technology and how old age re-orders our faculties.
Aitor Throup’s costumes may be cunning conjunctions of black and white, but there is nothing monochrome, or with such a strict palette in Mcgregor’s kaleidoscopic choreography. Luckily his dancers are superbly able to express his mercurial mindset.
Music Anna Meredith and Southbank Sinfonia Light On The Shore @ Leith Theatre
Neil Cooper *****
“NO,” says Anna Meredith pointing at her keyboard console as she quickly stymies an impromptu chorus of Happy Birthday from a section of the audience after making a dedication to a 12-year-old called Isaac. “This tune.” Meredith’s friendly but firm admonishment sums up an irrepressible effervescence that saw her 2016 album, Varmints, scoop that year’s Scottish Album of the Year.
Meredith has already graced the magnificent Leith Theatre stage as part of the 2017 grassroots-based Hidden Door Festival. This made her a logical choice for Edinburgh International Festival’s contemporary music season, Light On The Shore, which opened at the same venue last week with headline sets by King Creosote and Django Django. With Meredith having scored EIF’S epic opening event, Five Telegrams, hearing Varmints played in full with her four-piece band accompanied by the full orchestra of the Southbank Sinfonia is equally as thrilling.
Meredith’s guitar, tuba and cello frontline sport sparkly sci-fi silver apparel poached from early Roxy Music and Sun Ra’s Arkestra. With a video backdrop of cosmic constellations and disembodied animal heads floating in space, the music’s Reichian repetition married to martial chorales is as euphoric as it is insistent. Much of the set goes at a whip-crack gallop, with two new tracks including a delicate, nursery rhyme style ditty that recalls the naive pastoralism of
Virginia Astley. Meredith fist pumps the air frequently. And so she should. This is contemporary classicism designed for having it large.
Clearly having a ball and remaining playful to the last, Meredith puts her silver cape back on and her hood up for a thundering cover of Metallica’s metal behemoth, Enter Sandman Incorporating the themes to The Bill and The Sweeney, as with everything that went before, it’s a blast.
Dance Hocus Pocus The Studio, Potterow Mary Brennan ***
WHAT looks like a giant window is poised, mid-air, in the on-stage darkness. Gradually, something comes – as if out of nowhere – into the frame: exactly what it is, is not immediately obvious. Even when we can make out that it’s an arm, the way it arrives – isolated, disembodied – makes you think “are my eyes deceiving me here?” And there you have the very essence of Philippe Saire’s Hocus Pocus, a conjuring up of images that aren’t always what they seem at first sight, or indeed at a second or even a third look.
The fore-arm, like the lower leg that also appears, will acquire other body parts and, after a few topsy-turvy antics, they will all come together as a man. Well, two men, actually. Who, seen from the naked waist up, get to grips with laddish friendship through gung-ho arm-wrestling and by playfully bashing each other. Clearly some Boy’s Own adventuring is called for, and Saire is soon bringing fantastical larks into play: is that a plane, that takes off to infinity and beyond - or is the feathery wings of Icarus? Either way, disaster strikes and plunges the action into a deep sea realm that threatens to billow out of the gloom and lap over the front row. Strange critters come and go, all cunningly realised by the two remarkably athletic performers, Mickael Henrotaydelaunay and Ismael Diartzabal, who, - described as dancers, are more like contortionists as they negotiate the tight confines of the structure.
So is this a dance piece? Not in a conventional sense. Its appeal, for family audiences with youngsters aged 7+, is partly in puzzling out how the two men, and the creative team behind them, deliver such persuasive illusions. Then wondering if what you saw was done by techno whizzwizardry, or real people…