Scotland’s national company is in great shape. Now a festival regular, it presents a strikingly curated double bill, both parts moving with undercurrent narratives of collective spirit.
The company’s men, 12 of them, draw together for French choreographer Angelin Preljoçaj’s painterly gesture to the Last Supper. MC 14/22 (Ceci est Mon Corps), made in 2000, is an abstracted and intense analysis of male community: lighting and choreography both lock on to the anatomy of the group from the beginning, spotlighting skin and spine and torso, leaving identity in the shade.
While the progression of scenes is disorienting and sluggish at times, there are moments of pieta-style beauty, as well as some troubling scenes of nascent torture. Interlaced against the growling bass tone of an electronic soundscape, muscular choreography quotes the Bible’s scenes of life and death, good and evil. Six steel tables – centrepiece to the main bread and wine event – are choreographed to become platforms on which to swoon, square up, embrace. Built three-high, they also become a conceptual cliff from which apostles dive spectacularly, headfirst, into six pairs of arms: a heavenly finale.
Emergence by Crystal Pite has also been around for a while; devised for National Ballet of Canada in 2009, it has its European premiere here. A busy hybrid of classic ballet positioning, with corps lines and en pointe, it adds contemporary edge with insect/animal instincts. Dancers appear and disperse from all directions, including a brightly lit tunnel centre-stage.
Hovering in single, double, quadruple, multiple groupings, the company, an impressive 39-strong, settles satisfyingly en masse, arms beating in hummingbird unison.
Inspired by swarm intelligence theories, Pite converges the workings of the hive with that of the ballet company, encountering some fruitful comparisons. The pace is right, but detail feels wrong – performers counting out the beat, animal masks and satin corsets all seem stagey. While there is a fluid buzz around individual parts (the female solo in communion with three men being one), the choreography could perhaps have further delved into the mystery of swarm symmetry.
• At Festival theatre, Edinburgh, until 20 August. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
