A beautiful courtliness exhales from this luminous double bill.
Wayne McGregor’s Kairos strobes a clutch of dancers into our gaze behind the gauze of a musical score. It’s divine. The strings of Max Richter’s Recomposed: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons conduct the pace of the group, as they are transported from this fragmenting radiance into dramatic casts of moonlight, sunset, spotlight, day. Lucy Carter’s lighting design takes an authoritative position. As does the London-based artist Idris Khan’s set design. On his first foray into theatre, he layers full-height sheer and printed scores against a black-turning-blue curved wall, deeply rooted centre stage. Against this alchemical blackboard, the fine-cut, abstract formality of McGregor’s choreography groups and regroups. One, two, five: numbers-of-body formulae are repeated. With a precise but sinuous angularity, the mathematical tone of this sum of parts creates the illusion that the dancers have become the notes, and at times, the seasons, themselves.
“Till my bad angel fire my good one out”: Sonett, choreographed and designed by Christian Spuck, the company’s artistic director, follows. It, too, is a classy act; this time, a seductively dark, historically positioned narrative characterises the considerable action. Words from four Shakespeare sonnets are projected up large. Actor Mireille Mossé urgently recites them in French. Her presence is astonishing, her delivery both commanding and provocative. It is a measure of the success of the work that her power is so nobly matched by the company’s virtuoso abilities, as they form and reform the body language of a mercurial spell against the Glass and Mozart score.
Dancers – a generous 24 of them – duck out from under the black backdrop, Mossé hitches a snickering lift on the acres of the Dark Lady’s (Eva Dewaele) skirts, black tutus sophisticate and frock coats swirl in a circle of conjecture. It’s a short, sharp intake of breath of a piece, thrillingly alive in its dark love undertones.
• At Edinburgh Playhouse until 29 August. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
