Rotten Work & The Game of Life

Both works in Scottish Dance Theatre's latest double bill ask what holds a group together. Where The Game of Life follows individuals forming a collective without surrendering their uniqueness, Rotten Work instead grapples with the promise that “No one is allowed to be left behind”. The first finds pleasure in the formation of a group before watching it fall apart. The second tries to piece broken connections back together.

Clocks, a cuckoo and birdsong set the rhythm of The Game of Life, though the ticking lends it an edge of pursuit of something pending. Dressed in beige and marked by individual black patches, dancers begin with isolated twitches that infect the ensemble. The movement has a devised feel with each dancer retaining a selfishly detailed impulse, which is still able to alter the group's movement in the struggle to find a shared rhythm. Imitation never quite becomes uniformity, which is the work's pleasure. As the ticking recedes into echoes and darker drones, then slow piano, the common pulse falters. The dancers tire and disperse, and the group loses its shape. Yasmina Patel brings a cool edge to this final passage in a solo, where we are faced with her lonely desperation, left dancing until the last piano chord strikes.

But by contrast Rotten Work is less assured. At the back of the stage, clothes on a washing line hold hands, arms tied together, while by the end, all clothes and dancers have come apart. Their fragmented speech does the opposite. “Sorry, I couldn't, I was falling...” sounds like the debris of a relationship, but these found fragments gradually gather into something slightly coherent. Unfortunately the way these symbols play against each other creates an oblique connection which is difficult to reconcile. Both too much, and not enough, for example, is made of the washing line's motif, remaining conspicuous without a significance ever quite developing. The tableaux similarly evoke separation, but tend to hold it in place rather than take it somewhere new. Molly Danter's solo work brings an impassioned urgency to these scenes, giving the fragments a human immediacy that the choreography does not always engender.

Rotten Work & The Game of Life by Scottish Dance Theatre. Credit Brian Hartley.