A10-strong cast from the Scottish Dance Theatre start off this performance with a still-life scene, a sculptural montage, in which all the characters appear in the same light. As the performance progresses, it becomes clearer through a combination of movement and costume that the cast is divided between the living and the ghostly. The concept of this performance piece is to tell a story of ghosts, spirits and skeletons who weave their way through the lives of the living in various ways. The performance is technically accomplished, with dancers shining most in the smaller combinations, in which two or three dancers combine their individual forms and techniques as they move, transform, ungroup and regroup to create sculptural pieces of aesthetic quality which shows off some expressive choreography by Norwegian choreographer, Ina Christel Johannessen, particularly in the subtle hand gestures used.Midnight arrives and four extra cast members join in, in the form of dressed mannequins, with which the ghostly dancers interact, as soulless bodies. The dance has poise, delicacy, refinement. The lighting scheme is intriguingly unilateral, with flickering neon bars adding to the eerie effect and strong lighting lines coming in from sharp angles, accentuating shadows against bright light, creating a parallel shadow narrative on the backdrop. More could have been done with this. The company excels in technical execution, with the large space enabling the dancers to travel well, fully using the width and depth of the stage. However, the choreography does not favour the vertical field in the same way. In the performance I saw, the lifts, when they came, seemed earthbound, and given the subject matter, the performance could have benefited if they had been lighter. The inspiration comes from the work of Bruno Schulz, specifically a book of his short stories, The Street of Crocodiles. Schulz was a cosmopolitan Polish writer killed during WWII, whose writing is complex, multi-layered and has a typically dark emotional side to it. Only the ghost of emotional expression flitted across the dancers faces at odd moments, then left. The qualities of their movements were expressive and varied, but the emotional impetus from which they arose were unclear, as was the connection between the work and Schulz writing.
