Ten years into her successful tenure as artistic director of Scottish Dance Theatre, Janet Smith has revived and reworked Touching Zulu, itself a decade old.
Like many of the company's works, it manages to be challenging as well as accessible. On first appearance, almost too accessible: the dancers very obviously imitate birds and animals. But soon, their oddly articulated limbs and strange ambulations begin to exert a fascination, almost a wonder. Humans do eventually enter, and disrupt, this stage ecology, leaving us with a bold but unforced environmentalist message.
In the Middle of the Moment, by Johan Greben and Uri Ivgi, takes place within a small cell of light. It's haunted by a sombre woman (Ruth Janssen), who stalks its perimeter, coils and clenches her torso and hooks her fingers into claws. She's visited by a man (Michal Zahora) for a bleak duet in which they are constantly losing connection. At one point they link arms and turn towards us, putting on a public face of coupledom. They separate again, losing each other even within this small space, until Zahora, giving up the ghost, fades back into the darkness. It's a quiet and ultimately devastating portrait of isolation.
Four guest dancers, disabled in different ways, join the company for Adam Benjamin's Angels of Incidence. In the opening duet, two men lean against each other, both in support and in opposition. In such ways, the choreo-graphy shows how other people, objects (wheelchairs, crutches) and our own bodies can both impede and enable us. But there are too many shifts of set, sound and substance, and the piece feels like the beginnings of several different works forced into one. The dancers, though, are as fresh and convivial as ever.
· At the Corn Exchange, Newbury (01635 522733) tomorrow. Then touring
