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Iskander: Lewin: Popper: Curve: August 2006 Edinburgh, Dance Base by Ian Palmer |
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At the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art there is currently a fascinating exhibition exploring the works of Robert Mapplethorpe that poet of the photographer's lens. He has such an intriguing sense of the way light falls upon a face, the way it can clarify, the way it can mask and the way it can play with its subject in its suggestion of erotic charge and its glacial cool. I found myself thinking of Mapplethorpe whilst watching Michael Popper's latest work, Unbounded at Dance Base, (which is Edinburgh's equivalent of The Place) for it has that quality of watching a moving photograph - Popper's sinuous body is exposed to various and multi-angled light, revealing lithe movement and extraordinary muscularity, yet cloaking it with a sense of hidden danger, of unstoppable power. Light (designed by Peter Harrison) is presented as box, into which Popper flickers in and out, as spotlight, as shaft from upper stage, as dimming vision, hallucinatory in effect and from out of this arise the sound of the cello (Jane Rimer, placed dircectly on the stage, playing Judith Weir's haunting 1999 work Unlocked) and vision of dancer. In many ways it is a duet between the two, although there is no physical contact. Popper engages only with the music, sculpting movement from the sounds and techniques of the instrument - pizzicato becomes a frenzy of agile beats and rhythm, the mournful sonority of the cello's dark tone becomes expansive curves and dark lyricism - and from Weir's source material (she used the songs of black slaves from the Deep South), which becomes a physical lament for freedom, of living unbounded.
It was the sense of freedom which ran through Iskander Dance Company's beautiful El Saqiyeh, which translates as "the Waterwheel". Pastoral, serene, it reflects the ebb and the flow of the waters of the Nile, the daily toil of the Eygptian farmers, the continual cycle of life. Three dancers (Alessandro el Basioni, Aleitz Arregi and Claudia Parra Weitzman) breeze onto the stage, dancing in unison, encircling one another, weaving in and out. The quality of North African dancing is like no other - the upper body remains stiff, yet the hips, legs and the feet have a flexibility, a joyful bounce (watch the way they seem to pick their feet from off the floor), which is matched by the long tunics worn by the dancers which billow outwards giving a wonderful sense of harmony between costume, dance and music.
 Michael Popper's Unbounded © Scottish Dance Theatre
This would have been a splendid mixed bill of contemporary dance, were it not for the infiltration of Karl Jay-Lewin's It's About Time. Words could not do justice to the inutterable tedium of this piece, which was set to an electronic score that sounded like a man peeing in the bushes (the only rational effect of which was to make me want to go to the loo). The first five minutes (though it felt like five hours) consisted of two dancers (I shall save them the shame of naming them) running around in circles. The next twenty minutes involved them walking and standing around knock-kneed. It was supposed to represent "the perception of time from within the body when there is nowhere to go and nothing else to do". Oh how intellectual, oh how post-modern, oh how boring. Give me a break. Give me some dance.
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