Glacier

Published Wednesday 23 January 2008 at 13:30 by Mary Redman

What delight - a sold-out provincial contemporary dance premiere.

There’s something Busby Berkeley-ish about Maresa von Stockert’s latest dance theatre work, performed on a shiny grand piano black-lacquered floor with contrasting white polystyrene slabs of ‘ice’. A combination allowing for sliding about for all the world like icebergs, pack ice or surfboards on a calm sea.

Adrian Plaut’s light moving up and down the surface of a slender chrome tube drips off the end like a melting icicle. Images projected on to the surfaces instantly change our visual perspectives.

Unusually there is a script setting the scene of an artist and how he influences the work. How the public can be let loose to change it. How can we ignore the urgent need for environmental change?

Shadows created by the dancers complicate our view of the plain pieces of man-made fibre. The cracking noises and Jeremy Cox’s musical background urgently suggest both mechanical creation and the need for haste against pollution. Also referring back through Purcell’s The Cold Song to the Baroque era, but with a modern edge and seagull cries. Then suddenly a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour dominates as dancers perform an Argentinean tango as a polystyrene sandwich. Just as quickly ‘oil’ covers the dancers.

What does amaze as always is the stunning visual effect of von Stockert and her cast’s wit and imagination once set free on inanimate objects. It makes audiences think. Perhaps it should be subtitled 50 amazing things you never dreamt could be done with polystyrene.