Mary Brennan previews a series which owes as much to the club as the studio
DEEP in the darkness, something strange is stirring . . . Is it human? Is it a bird? See for yourself when Metacorpus Animated Body Appendages appear at the Arches as part of Funct 98. For, woven into the festival's programme of club culture and live music, there's a welcome strand of dance and physical theatre - four events in all, all at the Arches - that reflect the way sounds, images, technologies, and issues are criss-crossing between contemporary art forms and the club floor.
Spanish company Senza Tempo open the week with Lazurd - audiences may remember them from CCA performances of quite stunning, poetic intensity - while Frantic Assembly come in towards the end of the month with Zero, a fast-moving, deeply moving study of Generation X as it looks for direction on the eve of the millennium. In between times there's a double bill from Clearing Dance Company and Solo Body Theatre - both performances mixing dance cultures, one juxtaposing live dance with digitised video, the other using a hybrid combination of Indian classical dance and club-influenced improvisation - and there's Metacorpus . . .
At the centre of their performance is the work of two Edinburgh-based costume artists, Anna Cocciadiferro and Jeanette Sendler. Don't think, however, that this is some kind of fashion show. These are costumes as art forms, created as an expression of particular themes and concepts and then ''animated'' by a performer through sequences of specially devised choreography.
The transformation from human to bird and back again has been envisaged by Jeanette Sendler as an exploration of migration and the effect it can have on someone - changing country is akin to changing identity and carries with it the prospect of being ''different'', an outsider. Anna Cocciadiferro's costumes concern themselves with the body, especially when ageing. One costume, called Hair Armour, uses the hair to trigger association with mortality - hair is, technically, dead once it grows beyond the scalp; perversely it continues to grow after someone dies . . .
You begin to see how the choice of material, here, goes well beyond dress-making cotton or silk but looks, instead, to a palette more connected with sculpture or installation art work. In the same way, its proved important to find a way of displaying the costumes that goes well beyond catwalk parade or static exhibition. And so, choreographer Lindsay John - who has, among other things, been instrumental in bringing the full, glorious panoply of carnival to Glasgow's West End streets - has worked on movement with the performers, most of whom had no prior dance experience as such.
Chloe Dear was, in fact, intending to be one of the Metacorpus performers until she realised there was no-one to do any of the organising and admin: so she nobly put on the producer's hat instead. When, in early March of this year, the show drew full houses at St Bride's in Edinburgh it was, really, a triumph of invention and determination over no funding and no support structure other than friends and enthusiasts.
As she points out, this is all new and untried territory, very much borne out of the artists' own desire to take costume beyond the usual theatre context and into another arena of performance. Funct 98 at the Arches seems an ideal place for Metacorpus to reveal the visionary fabric of their art.
n Senza Tempo presents Lazurd tonight and tomorrow; Metacorpus performs on Wednesday/Thursday and Clearing Dance Company/Solo Body Theatre appear on Friday/Saturday; Frantic Assembly comes later, on May 27-30. All events are at the Arches at 8.00pm.
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