Dance

Life Is A Dream

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

***

“To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub...” Hamlet’s apprehension – and indeed his living nightmares – inspired choreographer Kim Brandstrup over a decade ago.

Now the troubling dream-legacy of sleep re-emerges in his response to Calderon’s play, Life Is A Dream (c 1635), in which an incarcerated Polish prince can never be certain if his brief day of freedom was indeed a visceral plunge into flesh and blood excesses... or just a fantastical wish projection.

Brandstrup’s new full-length choreography for Rambert, however, is not a literal rendition of the play. Instead, he embraces dreaming as a journey into those innermost urges and questions usually kept unspoken.

So it is that, in a dimly-lit rehearsal studio, a director falls asleep and conjures up aspects of the Calderon scenes he’s been working on – and in doing so explores aspects of his own identity through a fictitious prince beset by wild, free-fall imaginings.

For audiences, Act One is a maelstrom of incidents where certainties are elusive. As Lutoslawski’s music, played live, shifts dramatically between extremes of mood, so significant characters are assumed by more than one dancer and even the white-shirted director has a doppelganger.

The dingy set harbours deceptive shadows while the Quay Brothers’ projections are mirages of a natural world denied to those caught up in the monochrome kaleidoscope of encounters.

Confusing? Assuredly so.

Does Act Two resolve anything? Only if you abandon thoughts of a linear narrative and surrender to the confrontational intensity between the director’s two selves – Liam Francis and Miguel Altunaga -– as they wrestle to grasp what might, or might not be, the reality of who they are.

Holly Waddington’s clever costumes crossover timelines metaphysical soul-searching is as much the fabric of Calderon’s 17th century as it is Brandstrup’s current choreography, the latter sparked with restless agility, sudden elegance and high-flying lifts that the Rambert dancers deliver, for real, with bravura finesse.