Dance International Glasgow

James Cousins Dance

Tramway, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

four stars

THE Rosalind referred to in the title takes her character, her choices and dilemmas, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. No need, however, to brush up on the Bard beforehand: James Cousins isn’t doing the whole play. Instead, he’s taking the plot device of cross-dressing and using it to explore the gender stereotyping that hasn’t altered significantly since Shakespeare’s day.

Rosalind in a gauzy white dress looks demurely girly-girly. Her delicate, lissome movements all speak of the femininity implicit in the costume, and it’s a femininity that whispers of fragility. Rosalind in a man’s suit has a different presence. She can swagger, stand up for herself in male company, treat women as if they were ornamental objects. Even without Cousins’s cleverly detailed, gender-specific movements, the pecking order is made obvious through witty costumes (by Insook Choi).

Rosalind, however, is a piece, and an individual, with rich complexities. Even before she escapes to the Forest of Arden – represented on-stage by a large open-sided, neon-framed cube - she has been examining the moods and strengths that make her feel a “he” one day, and a “she” the next. Cousins echoes this by having three dancers, including one man (Inho Cho), portray Rosalind. This chameleon tactic edges her love duets with Orlando (Georges Hann) into subtle expressions of self-will, identity, even defiance. When Chihiro Kawasaki (“main” Rosalind) and Heejung Kim, as her visible double, intertwine in slippery power struggles, the sense of an inner search for a true and honest self needs no words – although words do come, in occasional readings of Sabrina Mahfouz’s feminist poetry. Cousins’s choreography is a whirlwind of demands on his dancers and they respond with grace, energy, precision and prowess – the kind of performance that’s definitely as we like it.