An intrepid and spirited company, Scottish Dance Theatre has regularly commissioned choreographers previously unknown in the UK; their current double bill is by two new Americans. Both pieces are puzzling – but as with the best puzzles, you get caught up in them nonetheless. Lay Me Down Safe, by New Yorker Kate Weare, is a string of non sequiturs and musical shifts (plaintive piano, washboard percussion, Leonard Cohen), and it's up to you whether to search for a pattern.
It opens with three men doing a cracked backing-dance routine to a punky pop song, before being swept up into a group that dissolves into air-punching and cart-horse trots. There follows an intimate male duet that keeps tipping between combat, tenderness and trepidation. If there is an overall theme, it seems to be that relations are riven by such ambivalence. A woman knocks her partner's head against her chest as if her heartbeat were punching him; two couples merge into a unstable quartet; groups form and fracture as often as partnerships do. Desire is often to the fore, but because everyone wears similar tunics and skirts, gender is not. The piece is held together by a scattering of recurrent motifs – froggy squats, territorial stamps – and by the riveting detail of its phrasing.
Khaos, by San Francisco-based Benjamin Levy, is in some ways similar: arrestingly articulate, with fluid and fascinating groupings, unstable encounters and abrupt musical lurches. But it takes a different direction. Hints of portentous story and symbolism are invoked by two giant sacs, one on stage and one suspended above it, that inflate into amoebic white balloons, variously suggesting a cocoon, ectoplasm, a primordial blob and an alien spacepod. It's baffling, yet the inventiveness of the choreography still grips.
