Physical Landscape review: John Scott’s refashioned dance fizzes with exhilarating energy

Physical Landscape

Project Arts Centre, Dublin★★★★☆

Six dancers circle the audience clustered together on stage for the start of Physical Landscape. In turn the performers shout out each letter of a carefully curated alphabet, summoning an eclectic mix of names, places, people, concepts and emotions. They respond equally eclectically as they spin around the stage.

The audience swivel and crane to catch the 26 moving snapshots. A is for “anarchy” (evident!). B is for “butts” – the dancers bend over. There’s a collective pause at G, for “genocide”; then, shortly, scarifying roars at “terror”. The sequence continues all the way to “zoo”. We get it. We are in a physical landscape and the body politic is on alert.

An alphabet dance might be a humorous, inventive start, but, as expected, this refashioned work from John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre (originally commissioned for the Five Lamps Arts Festival earlier this year) continues with the athleticism and the relentless, exhilarating energy that are such signatures of the dancemaker’s recent work.

Yet perhaps we see a note of caution. The landscape and environment are still physical and pulsating, but a slowdown could be imminent.

The dancers – Alessandra Azeviche, Boris Charrion, Magdalena Hylak, François Malbranque, Favour Odusola and Bruno Senune (replacing Adam O’Reilly) – are magnetic. Casually dressed in colourful vests, trousers and flexible trainers, they deliver with sinuous energy and grace.

Scott’s perfectly paced, often deceptively simple steps create subtle patterns of dance. The performers who fill Project’s stripped-down stage clearly revel in interweaving their vertical but loose-limbed bodies, legs extended, arms stretched to the skies.

A phase of sneezing dance – bodies lurching, shaking from head to foot, every muscle twitching in unison – is a delight. A show-off dance, with strut and swagger, all shoulders and puffed-out chests, is also entertaining, but now with a knowing edge. An undercurrent of urgency suggests that time is running out.

In the final phases of the dance, that sense of an ending, or of hesitation about the future, is emphasised by Jürgen Simpson’s composition and Eric Wurtz’s lighting design. The six performers advance and retreat in syncopated moves, shaping and shifting in twos and threes, as the soundscape turns full and ominous.

Once vertical and full of verve, they now come closer to the ground, rolling and curling into one another, their bodies cleaving and sheltering from the unknown. It could be a sudden sandstorm, an unfriendly drone, an avalanche of mud, a bomb. It’s an uncertain world. The dancers are right. We need to stick together.

Physical Landscape is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Saturday, October 31st, then at Black Box, Galway, on Monday, November 2nd