Dance

CounterActs/Alba

Tramway, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

four stars

The Unlimited season ended on Saturday, with two very different productions that nonetheless shared the same intention: to challenge perceptions of disability by putting creative vision and artistic excellence centre-stage.

Twenty-five years ago, Candoco brought together an inclusive group of dancers who showed audiences that choreographed movement wasn’t the sole province of the able-bodied. Candoco stills displays a ready willingness to take risks, not least in its repertoire choices: CounterActs is a prime example of that spirit. Beheld, choreographed by Alexander Whitley, sets the company some material hazards with swathes of sheeny-shimmering cloth involved on-stage. An initial process of folding and unfolding a length of fabric, done at unnervingly slick speed, introduces an underlying theme of how, and what, we perceive, with dancers masked from view or suddenly revealed. Upstage, a seemingly solid back-cloth comes alive, its metallic surface initially flaring with pinpoints of light until Tanja Erhart abandons her crutches and, balancing on her one leg, finds subtle support from within its kinetic folds. A shape-shifting cats-cradle of gold, black and silvery cloth sets everyone whirling into a games-play that speaks not just of prowess but of company rapport.

That rapport speaks for itself in Hetain Patel’s Let Talk About Dis, where dancers come to the microphone and volunteer details of themselves, and their disability. There’s forthright disclosure, a lot of humorous joshing – the section where Laura Patay, Toke Broni Strandby and Jason Mabana define themselves purely in terms of height, not disability is wickedly funny – but above all, a sense of confident belief in who they all are, as individuals and as Candoco.

Jo Bannon’s eerily lovely solo show, Alba, has her own Albinism as a starting point for a mosaic of haunting imagery that links symbolic associations of white with religious ritual. Being born on the day the Pope visited her home town of Coventry, persuades her mother that Jo, and her distinctive pallor, are miraculous. With her mother’s voice on tape, Bannon dispatches everyday domestic tasks, finally washing her spun silver hair which fans out like a halo. Her mother was right: Jo Bannon brings something extraordinary to her work, and to us.