Letters from America

Letters from America is a striking double bill by two of America’s most sought after, emerging choreographers. Read more …

Khaos by Benjamin Levy, uses Levy’s individual choreographic voice to explore the distinction between continual, shifting change and transformation. What are the elements that lead to a drastic shift of life course and identity, such that we will never feel the same way again? Designer Garance Marneur’s inflatable set changes and moves, alternately supporting, pushing back, welcoming and suffocating, as dancers navigate the volatile atmosphere in Levy's active/reactive choreographic style.

Lay Me Down Safe by Kate Weare, draws on the individuality of each dancer to take you on a tender foray into our human inexperience at reckoning with desire and loss.  Offering up a sensuous movement and fierce physicality, Lay Me Down Safe explores whether desire - the experience we follow like a moth to flame - ultimately keeps us safe from harm, or places us right in harms way.  The work features designs by Katherina Radeva and is lit by Jon Clark, recipient of an Outstanding achievement Olivier Award in 2009.

More information on this production is available at www.scottishdancetheatre.com.

The critical consensus

Janet Smith, SDT’s artistic director, once described movement to me as “bodies writing in space and time – but with an invisible ink”. Watching this new double bill, coupled under the umbrella title Letters From America, brought those words to mind. Albeit with very different vocabularies, the specially commissioned choreographies from Kate Weare (New York) and Benjamin Levy (San Francisco) trace profound moments of everyday human experience while inscribing transient hopes, fears and desires against design backdrops and soundscores.

(*) Mary Brennan, The Herald, 21/02/2011