Far From Sleeping Dogs, the latest work from Slovenian choreographer Iztok Kovak, is partly a formal inquiry into the ways in which movement, music and image can co-exist - a matter that it pursues with the kind of ascetic fervour that only central Europeans seem to muster these days.
Its five women dancers perform on a monochrome stage, with a musical accompaniment provided solely by the veteran avant garde trombonist Vinko Globokar, who "performs" in a black and white film projected behind them. The choreography responds to the sound of Globokar's music in conventional ways, but it also mimics his actions.
At various points he is filmed blowing his trombone in a bucket of water or playing percussion on parts of his body and the dancers, likewise, dip their faces into water, slap themselves and blow. Kovak even has the dancers enter the music physically, adjusting the screens onto which Globokar's image is projected, so that as they move they are literally "inside" it.
Yet on another, more interesting level the dance is not about form but history. Globokar's film is spliced with propaganda footage from the Tito era, which shows hundreds of Yugoslav women drilled into heroic gymnastics and factory work. At times the live dancers are sucked into this past as their movements echo its simple athleticism. But at others they contradict it in a sophisticated choreographic fusion of the classical and improvisatory.
It is as if the two films are playing tug-of-war in their bodies, pulling them between state identity and questing individualism, between past and present. Kovak's work, not surprisingly, is weighted towards the latter, and closes with Globokar comically, and doggedly experimenting with just how many ways he can play an alpenhorn.
The combined charm and commitment of both live and filmed performances makes the piece work as theatre as well as theory, but sometimes only just. Sitting through its extended conclusion I was grateful not to be listening to an entire concert of Globokar's music.
