There is a look people get when they dance around the kitchen by themselves. They dance and dream; they shut their eyes and swish their head. Somebody does just that in Sad Europeans, premiered at the New Territories season of dance and performance in Glasgow this week. It's a small gesture, and typical of this work by Portuguese choreographer Paulo Ribeiro.
It is a curious piece, full of little things whose cumulative effect is hard to fathom. While the seven dancers jitter along to the jolly wheeze of a squeeze-box, mysterious happenings are afoot. Dark figures enter in slow motion, and a girl floats in the arms of three men. Another woman jerks that soft spell apart. It feels as if we are heading for something heavy. But then a shaven-headed ringmaster takes the mickey out of the melancholy.
Reassuringly, he promises to give us some clues about what it all means. He tells us that these dancers are acting European, with all that mix of history and difference on their shoulders. But apart from a tableau of Christ on the cross, there is nothing grandiose about their roles. This is an intimate, cafe society group, and as they dance the parts of wife of Jesus, Fritz Lang movie extra, Riverdance troupe and drug dealer from Bucharest, it is the dance itself that holds all of the answers and most of the intrigue.
Ribeiro plays his company like a cabaret, pulling his performers out for turns, wriggling and stroking them through his mind's eye. Very different shapes and sizes, they vibrate with a grotesque beauty and surprising tenderness. Surprising because this choreography has a brutal, muscular quality that does not shy from erotic rubbing.
Facial expressions are exaggerated and moves make puppets of bodies, but it is real people we see before us. Couplings and groups dance out a need to connect in a disconnected world. Humour and playfulness ease what is essentially a serious piece about relationships and identity. Ribeiro's dance is tender, thought-provoking and captivatingly restless, and this work is bound to move the sad European in all of us.
