The weighty issue of mortality informs Kally Lloyd-Jones’s latest work for Company Chordelia. An hour-long piece with six dancers in everyday clothes and trainers, it earnestly attempts to confront the incomprehensible certainty of non-existence.
In subject and practice, dance is so often about youth – the title suggests the adolescent victim of The Rite of Spring – but Lloyd-Jones offers some thought provokingly mature alternatives. In one particularly effective sequence, a single dancer prepares, with jittery intensity, for a series of balances and turns, each time crashing to the floor. It evokes not only the brevity of a dancer’s onstage life, but also something broader about futility, achievement and carrying on regardless.
The theme of cosmic insignificance – we see the six performers scattered to the ground like dust – is countered by the presence of certain significant others. Eventually, the unsteady dancer is swooped up into the arms of another; what follows, though, isn’t a romantic pas de deux, but a compelling duet of grappling, scrabbly mutual dependence that looks labour-intensive and sometimes quite fun. It’s a touching reminder that the business of living is messy and difficult, but worth it with loved ones.
The dancers also excel in a section of jerky fast-forward motion in which the momentousness and minutiae of life – laughing, crying, sleeping, chatting – slips past at a sickeningly uncontrollable speed.
Elsewhere, the dance is less illuminating and the material feels stretched frustratingly thin: there is quite a lot of traipsing back and forth with mirrored boxes, punctuated by stricken expressions and dramatic gasps, while the sublime reach of the accompanying music – Strauss’s Four Last Songs, or the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem – confers emotional clout by proxy.
At Dance Base, Edinburgh, until 25 August.
