Dance
Scottish Ballet:Digital Season
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
four stars
Two years ago, Scottish Ballet dipped a bold toe into new and uncharted waters with its first ever Digital Season: the short films, live streams and digital experiments put the company on screens - large and small - not just at home, but worldwide. Now, as part of this year’s 50th anniversary celebrations, a second (and more ambitious) Digital Season carries that initiative forward. The resulting works will be released online over the next four weeks.
First up is Tremble, co-directed and choreographed by Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple. There’s a wink of black humour in how 26 glam diners are, in quick succession, shape-shifted into athletic-balletic waiters bearing trays of wibbly- wobbly jellies.The role-reversal action is fast-paced, surreal - there’s even a Busby Berkeley moment, captured from above. Great fun, wittily clever. Frontiers is next, choreographed by Myles Thatcher, directed by Eve McConanachie and filmed amid the concrete pillars of the Kingston Bridge underpass. Here, six dancers - three women, three men - come and go in sudden close encounters where partners change in the blink of a lens, and aspects of gender and identity have a free-fall sense of self-discovery outwith ballet’s norms.
The triptych of works by Scottish Ballet’s first-ever digital artist in residence, Zachary Eastwood-Bloom, arrives later this month and uses new choreographies (two of them by company members) and ancient myths as a springboard for virtual invention. On-screen, digitised bodies dance within imagery that adds astute layers of allegorical meaning to the movement. The Fates inhabit a cats-cradle of black life-lines, the oppositional interplay of forethought and hindsight between Prometheus and Epimetheus sees a muscular male duet heightened by black and white ectoplasmic bonds that stretch and retract between them, while The Three Graces pursue Instagram perfection in a blossom-filled garden - delicious! It’s dance as you’ve never seen it before - yours to explore online at www.scottishballet.co.uk/digital.
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