Susan Marshall and Company
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
Rating: **
When choreographers opt to put spoken words into their work it is not uncommon for the words to seem second-rate. The verbal language is less confidently crafted than the physical and its execution less skilled. But in Susan Marshall's The Most Dangerous Room in the House, in which the text is professionally written and delivered by an actress, the effect is of dance being outclassed.
Over the past 17 years Marshall has become one of America's most respected choreographers and in 1996 her collaboration on an opera with Philip Glass brought her even wider acclaim. She has spoken of the opera as a milestone in her developing interest in combining words and dance. In The Most Dangerous Room, it looks as if she has virtually abandoned the latter.
As its title suggests, the piece is about fear - the kind that stalks us even in our happiest moments: the fear that our child might fall ill, our body fail or chaos erupt. Marshall's stage is bare save for a segment of wall and a couple of chairs that suggest a domestic interior.
Within this space eight performers race around in states of panic. They cast terrified looks behind, leap blindly into each other's arms, one grabs at another's hand as if to ward off a blow or forestall an accident. But while there are obvious intimations of terror, Marshall's choreography is so sketchy, so haphazardly repetitive that it creates the visual equivalent of white noise, 80 minutes of vague frenzy passing in front of our eyes, signifying little.
One of the performers, an older woman, regularly detaches herself from the group to speak Christopher Renino's text and the contrast with the main body of dance is stark. The words may be allusive but they are sharply and economically structured.
One section is a haunting litany of urgent responses to a medical crisis, while another becomes a hallucinatory poem in which a woman watches a knife slice through a melon and imagines a surgeon's steel cutting her flesh. At these moments, when the dancers move in an agitated chorus, we genuinely feel the passing shadow of dread. But generally in this puzzlingly underdeveloped piece our most abiding emotion is frustration at so much energy going to waste.
