Having long been known for virtuoso, dynamic music making, in recent years the Scottish Ensemble has begun delving into the adventurous territory of cross-genre collaboration. Last year there was Tabula Rasa, a meditation on death and dying created with Vanishing Point theatre company. Before that, Goldberg Variations saw the ensemble working with Andersson Dance on the music of Bach.
It is Andersson Dance and the music of JS Bach to which the ensemble has returned for this latest project. Extracts from the Art of Fugue are juxtaposed with Lutosławski’s Preludes for solo strings and Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge in expanded version for string orchestra. Where Tabula Rasa was based in the concrete reality of the experience of dying, this latest project is decidedly more enigmatic. According to the note from the creators, the work “delves into the contradictions of the subconscious mind, from the absurd to the logical, from the irrational to the soothingly clear”.
In practice, this appears to mean three dancers engaged in frenzied, tortuous activity in stark juxtaposition to the ensemble’s elegantly austere delivery of Bach from various groupings on the stage. Much has been made of choreographer Orjan Andersson’s use of non-professional dancers, but in truth more participation from the members of the Scottish Ensemble would have been welcome. The one section where the players writhe and gyrate around the stage, like a groovy 1970s party set to the music of Bach is one of the highlights. Elsewhere, the ensemble is largely confined to walking around a bit, sometimes barefoot, which doesn’t appear to cast the music in particularly new light. As for the complex choreography of the trio of professional dancers, there often seems to be a mismatch between the stillness of the music and the energy of the movement. Or maybe that’s the point. Yet whatever its shortcomings, this is an interesting, if not entirely coherent experiment.
