Dance
Estonia Now: Contemporary Performance Triple Bill
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
Four stars
As we move between the intimate, black box of Tramway 4 and the open expanses of Tramway One, the journey we’re actually taking is across some 20 years of Estonia’s contemporary dance and performance scene. What emerges from the three very different solos is a sense of radical work rooted in personal experiences, and in an ongoing need to question received aesthetics and methodologies.
This is especially true of Mart Kangro’s Start. Based on a True Story (2001) in which various movement styles – including tap dance, gymnastics and ballet – are referenced in an energetic, often humorous collage that suggests a determined training regime with little room for self-expression.
Kangro, however, breaks away. Offsets routine classes with a final exercise where walking builds into a tremendous test of stamina as he runs and runs round Tramway One - and finds himself... 17 years on, Start remains utterly compelling and valiant.
For Karl Saks, the artist is always in the dock and his episodic solo, State and Design (2017), is a raw, visceral confrontation with what it’s like to be judged by others, audiences in particular. He goes to almost wilful lengths to amuse or challenge us: he capers clownishly, subjects himself to physical stresses, juxtaposes abrasive soundscapes with carefully posed emblematic images, all within the confines of a space he has used his body to map out in Tramway 4. His world is this stage. He might occasionally leave, but still he returns to face the music, and us, to perform again. It’s a highly charged, bruising work that calls the relationship between performer and audience to uncomfortable account.
Sigrid Savi is the lively, likeable newcomer here, with Imagine There’s A Fish (2018) in which her platinum-bobbed doll-girl bounces about, demanding our attention, our help, even our (already provided) floral tributes. It’s a sharp-witted, playful reminder of how our collusion in make-believe matters to a performer.
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