In 1969, BS Johnson wrote a novel called The Unfortunates, whose chapters came unbound and stacked in a box. The reader was free to throw them into the air and read the novel in whatever order they landed. This is a little like the concept of En Knap's Skin.
The material for the show comes in 40 segments, which the six dancers deliver in a new order at each performance. On paper this may sound like wilful perversity: why would choreographers Iztok Kovac and Julyen Hamilton want to make performing any harder? And why would the audience care about the concept since they have no part in its execution?
But Kovac has always gone in search of the magic that conjures tightrope moments of beauty or strangeness on stage. And this last-minute hurdle keeps him and his dancers on their toes.
We get an edgy pleasure from watching the company's stage personalities flit randomly into focus. Kovac, neat but scarily strong, wheels around the stage in pursuit of some psychological prey. Andreja Rausch twitches at the mercy of skittering demons, Karmit Burian glories calmly in her burnished, gymnastic moves. Around them musician Sebastiano Tramontana clatters a quirky accompaniment, and we piece together whatever stories we choose from their precisely executed chaos.
Even better are the brief moments of togetherness, when the cast assemble into units of slicing, deftly folded dance. But some of the segments thrown into the mix are themselves improvised - and this is one step too far into randomness. While the dancers never miss a beat, their stream of conscious monologues and off-the-cuff partnerships veer too close to wittering or portentousness. The effect not only topples the work's poise into inconsequentiality, it also makes us feel that Skin is more for the performers' benefit than our own.
