Base Elements

★★★

archive review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes

By Catherine Sylvain

Published 21 Aug 2010

39658 original

Base Elements is a mix of somewhat mismatched pieces of contemporary dance. One half is unnervingly nightmarish, the other a delicate dream. The former comes from dancer-choreographer Lucy Suggate whose first piece involves her lurching uncomfortably in a gold lycra suit like C3P0 having a breakdown. It's challenging to the idea that dance must be beautiful and suggests a deeper pain than poise. It's more unnerving still by the fact that Suggate continues moving long after the music has finished. Yet her second piece is even more discomforting for its costume alone. Suggate wears a tacky nightclub hostess's dress and wig but her face is slathered in sellotape through which she breathes loudly while she dancing frenetically to the slow score of Wim Wender's Paris, Texas. Suggate's two pieces are daringly out of synch, both with the music and with dance preconceptions.

The centre-piece of Base Elements is Jodie Sperling's tribute to early-modern dancer Loie Fuller. Sperling reworks Fuller's five-part Dance of the Elements spectacularly using 100 yards of silk. Where Suggate seems pained in her dancing, Sperling relishes the opportunity to swirl and spiral amid the enormous costume. It is hypnotic and dazzling both for Sperling's dexterity and for the good use of lighting upon the white silk so that it resembles on different occasions a huge rose, butterfly wings and some tangled bedsheets. While the performances in Base Elements are mismatched, they are each as visually arresting as the other.