Yolande Snaith's latest work, Maximum Machine, is set in a mad inventor's attic, with ropes and pulleys hanging from wooden beams, and archaic measuring devices stacked in corners. Its six dancers are wearing outfits assembled from centuries of discarded fashion, and are engaged in obsessive, Heath Robinson experiments. A woman in a hooped skirt and aviator's helmet lies strung between metal harnesses, trying to figure out the most efficient way of swimming through space while a man in a leather apron and goggles paces the stage with a measuring wheel.
There's a Swiftian air of intellectual derangement about all of their activities - people intent on elaborating their private systems with little regard for the real world - and its a derangement Snaith wittily pursues. In the work's middle section, her experimenters engage in scrupulous investigations of their own bodies. A women raises and lowers her leg while another measures the angle it forms and two men practice wrestling holds. Together, the dancers try to function as a dancing machine, disciplining their moves into choreographed unison as one man helplessly attempts to compute their activity.
Machines also go haywire and Snaith diverts into comedy as the dancers' experiments turn destructively manic. But its in these "humorous" sections, that the weakness of the work is most evident, for its here that the dancing is most exposed as repetitive and slight.
Snaith is an original. Her sets (conceived with Barnaby Stone) are works of art, ingeniously put in motion by her dancers and her ideas are both clever and magical. But her choreography always remains secondary to her stagings and in this, as in all her shows we long for her fantasies to be elaborated by more sophisticated, imaginative dance. If bodies are machines and dancers are scientists then she could surely invent more ambitious moves than the basic steps and gestures offered here.
Still, despite its choreographic limitations Maximum Machine remains one of Snaith's best works, rich in historical and intellectual allusion and with a conclusion that's oddly touching. Four dancers stand gazing at the stars while the flying woman continues her vain attempts at flight and the man with the measuring wheel wanders ineffectually round the stage. Here in a single image is the blind faith of the lonely scientist, chasing after elusive truths while the world looks on with indifference, or ridicule.
Until tomorrow, then at the Hexagon, Reading (0118 960 6060) on 8 March.
