Dance: Within This Dust and Chaos and Contingency

Within This Dust is an example of the kind of choreography that I warmly approve. Inspired by the events of 9/11 - in particular the photographs by Richard Drew of a man falling from the building and appearing to take flight - it is determined to engage with the wider world, and has moments of dance-theatre (half acting, half dancing) that are intense, immediate and moving.

Across three pieces, Within This Dust tries to make sense of the horror of 9/11

It's no accident that Dance Base booked Smallpetitklein into their Fringe programme in both 2011 and 2012: first of all for an extract, then a return gig for the complete trilogy. Like the press release says, it "touches the intellect as well as emotion." 

Dance can be a hard sell: as a critic who unashamedly loves the form, I wonder whether my enthusiasm is being flung into an abyss of disinterest and antagonism. I could try to throw around a few cliches - how everyone dances, that the unique quality of dance is to echo the metaphorical meanings of an event, and through choreography put individual experience into a broader context. Unfortunately, I am a critic, not an academic, and while I'll badger away at the more definitive meanings - mostly through slapping up 500 words on here, or slipping a throwaway line into a review - it is the practical experience of watching dance that has captivated me. 

It's unlikely that my writing about dance will persuade anyone. But the recent triple bill by Mark Brew at Tramway, or the erotic savagery of Por Sal Y Samba at manipulate, make explicit what I am struggling to explain. Dance can engage the intellect and the emotions in a similar way to theatre, but the emphasis on movement makes it all the more visceral.

Another Scottish company, Janis Claxton Dance, invited me into the studio last week to see a rehearsal of Chaos and Contingency. Standing on the rooftop, looking into the studio (the piece has been designed to be watched from multiple angles),  I quickly realised that Claxton's choreography here was a study in how the repetition of simple gestures can evolve into an unspeakably complex weaving of dancers around the space and each other. 

This simplicity is deceptive - all of the dancers are technically accomplished, including three whom Claxton brought across from China - and the basic vocabulary owes as much to the soft sway of Tai Chi as to the rigours of either classical or Cunningham traditions. Even in this early form, the use of numbers made Chaos and Contingency something between a meditation on mathematics and the kabbalistic meanings of numerology. 

Yet unlike reading a scientific text book, it was not baffling - it encouraged me to have another crack at those formulae that give me a headache - and unlike the usual esoteric mysticism, it wasn't soft headed junk. 

Within This Dust takes on a very different theme (death, despair et al), but it shares Chaos and Contingency's ability to translate ideas into the physical realm. In different ways, both pieces affirm my faith in dance as a medium: that they have such radically different subjects, and avoid sentimentality, and that their basic approaches to movement are so different. 

Somewhere between the two comes my enthusiasm for dance. It isn't difficult to define, although definitions are always contested and can be deconstructed (dance has been described as "bodies moving in space" in an attempt to include every possible genre of dance, leaving the definition so basic as to mean nothing): but it is difficult to express. Then again, that's the whole point. If Chaos and Contingency could be fully explained in verbal language, there would be no need for the choreography. 

Thank God language is a failure.

Within This Dust Tour Dates
Wed 13 February – Woodend Barn, Banchory
Fri 1 & Sat 2 March – Center for Performance Research, New York, USA
Sat 16 March – Eastgate Centre, Peebles
Tue 19 March – Gardyne Centre, Dundee
Fri 22 March – The Brunton, Musselburgh
Sat 23 March – Birnam Centre, Dunkeld
Wed 10 April – The Riverfront, Newport
Fri 12 April – Square Chapel, Halifax
Thu 18 April – The Palace Theatre, Kilmarnock
Wed 1 & Thu 2 May – Aberystwyth Arts Centre

Chaos and Contingency Tour Dates

Saturday 2 & Sunday 3 March
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
in association with Tramway
Midday and 2pm
FREE

Saturday 16 March
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Presented by Citymoves Dance Agency as part of March Moves in association with Aberdeen Art Gallery
Midday and 2pm
FREE

Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 March
National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
in association with Edinburgh International Science Festival and National Museums Scotland
1:00pm and 3:00pm
FREE