Scottish Dance Theatre - Sorry for the Missiles!

Published Friday 24 August 2007 at 15:10 by Thom Dibdin

Constructed around snatches of Eastern European folk musics, Vanessa Haska’s latest piece for Scottish Dance Theatre is an exploration of the effect of war on civilian populations.

It is edgy, sometimes ragged choreography that is similarly based on folk dance and in which precision and form take second place to emotion and interpretation.

The world first created, one of joy and celebration in a freewheeling feast-time dance, is not without its internal sense of repression as the company are sat in the pews of their meeting place.

A lone female dancer who flees from the body of the company is soon brought back by two male dancers - it is somehow prescient of the thunderous sound of low-flying aircraft that rips across the stage.

It takes real skill to bring this kind of interpretative piece into focus without appearing trite. SDT have no failings in this, as they immerse their audience in passages that conjure the intimate horrors of war. Of pulling shoes from the dead, of fleeing half naked from bomb blast, of people driven into the madness of repetitive actions and of carting dead loved ones away like sacks of rubbish. And finally, the true horror of discovering yourself in the same place you were at the start.