Robin Dingemans, one of the five dancers in Wally Cardona's Elsewhere, spends most of his time on stage hauling around sheets of padded, plastic matting. Like an exasperated child who has been handed an impossible puzzle, he experiments with tilting the mats into barriers, arranging them into pathways, occasionally flipping them on top of his fellow performers. Dingemans is in fact an interesting, grown-up dancer. But the seemingly pointless task he has been set is typical of an evening in which his talent, along with that of the other four members of Ricochet, has been squandered.
Cardona's work (the second in a double bill, following Jan Pusch's Real Deal) seems to be about the building blocks of dance, as Dingeman's puzzle-making tracks the choreography's development from single tracks of dance to colliding duets and briefly massed body sculptures. Sections of the movement are well crafted, and the cast are individually very watchable. If Cardona had had the courage of his structural convictions and simply stuck with movement, this could have been a decent piece.
Unfortunately, the whole unwieldy mat business overwhelms the dancing, and its irritation factor is compounded by the irksome buzz of Daniel Mudford's electronic score. Worse, Cardona flags up his theme of choreographic growth by tacking on a random long-winded extract from a radio programme about lawn cultivation. This is postmodernism by numbers.
Advertising itself as a study of free will and determinism, with choreography that ranges from the mechanistic to the seemingly improvised, this is a work that adds up to so much less than the sum of its own contrivances, as the dancing is punctuated by a monologue on the nature of accidents, instructions from the director (written on yellow sticky-notes) and yet another grim score from Mudford.
In the past, Ricochet have been endearingly smart, adventurous commissioners of new choreography. In this new double bill, however, it is not just the performers who feel trapped in a recalcitrant universe.
· At Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, on November 10. Box office: 0131-665 2240. Then touring.
