|
|
Siobhan Davies Dance Company
The Sunday Times
Bird Song was originally conceived for performances in the round, the dance enveloped in light and colour. It looks different, perhaps better, as reworked for the Wells stage, with Adrian Plaut's brilliant lighting flooding the backdrop and floor with washes of dazzling blues and reds, flickering patterns, grids for dancing spaces. The movement floods, too, as the cast of eight are galvanised into skitterings and crawlings formations, friezes and games, by fragments of eclectic noise in Andrew Pink's soundtrack.
There are enigmatic duets, and clever solos for Mariusz Raczynski, as a silent tap dancer; Deborah Saxon, dancing to a clicking that could be, but isn't, her own heels; and, at the heart of the piece, Henry Montes, rippling and fluttering imaginary wings, listening, alert on an imaginary branch, to the beautiful trill of the Australian pied butcherbird, which gives the piece its title.
David Dougill, October 2005
|
|
The Siobhan Davies Dance Company's latest production, Bird Song, came to the Linbury Studio Theatre, Covent Garden, where the seating was reconfigured in a square, to give varying views of the dance and close contact with the dancers. Adrian Plaut's ingenious lighting floods the floor with wipes and washes of changing colours, creating separate, mysterious spaces in which the troupe of eight (each a compelling performer) cluster and rush, crawl and process - or split up for intricate solos and duets.
Davies's choreography is sculptural, concentrated, meticulously detailed, but trying to keep track of different, simultaneous activity is not easy. At the heart of the work, and of Andy Pink's eclectic sound score, is the lovely trilling melody of the call of the Australian pied butcher bird, to which the excellent Henry Montes becomes like a bird himself: hyper-alert and hypnotised by the song. This is the most fascinating and beautiful image of the piece. David Dougill, October 2004
next review...
|
|
|