Edinburgh, The Playhouse
19 August 2007

America and Americana have long inspired Ashley Page in his Directorship at Scottish Ballet. In 2005 he launched their first Edinburgh Festival performances in 20 years with a splendid all-Balanchine bill; last year he presented the clarifying Agon and an incandescent staging of Robbin's Afternoon of a Faun (and I still recall with great pleasure the innocence of Luisa Rocco and Christopher Harrison in that ballet). This year Americana splices through the heart of the programme and through an afternoon of Stephen Petronio, Trisha Brown and Ashley Page is hardly going to excite the traditional balletomanes (amongst whose number I include myself), but there is no doubt that it places Scottish Ballet, newly resuscitated and energized, at the forefront of contemporary ballet.

Petronio's Ride the Beast (the first outside choreographic commission since Page took office) is a high-octane, furiouso number without any let-up and it shows the Scottish dancers (especially Jarkko Lehmus and Paul Liburd) at their dazzling best. It is inspired by a boat-crossing in Central Park, yet there are Miltonic over-tones, the dancers white and black-clad as angels and demons (I suspect the designer, Benjamin Cho, was inspired by Berlin's fetish nightclubs) who seem to be locked in battle. I was especially impressed by the way Petronio textures the rhythm of the body within its space, taking the melisma of Radiohead's endless droning (I have never been a fan) and at its height seeming to ride the dancers bodies (whether it be through a high kick, or a long twisting of the torso) through and around the music. At the works end, two parallel lines of dancers ebb into drifting confusion, before returning (the beast presumably having been tamed) to black silhouetted order.

After this high-speed ride, Trisha Brown's For MG: The Movie seems like soothing tonic or, if you prefer, Valium. It is so slow-paced it is as if the dancers are wading through syrup and Brown is de-constructing every movement. Indeed one dancer is so post-modern he never moves at all. As the curtain rises, Spencer Brown's lighting bathes the stage in a sunrise, a dewy haze, which clears to reveal a New York street-scene. Alvin Curran's score evokes city noises - a faulty motor, the drilling of road-works, a piano being tuned from a distant apartment - and in this lazy calm, the dancers run backwards (slowing down to but one step), roll along the floor, arch and bend their bodies into hollow shapes. It is trance-inducing, and, I confess, too much for me. I kept on hoping that in the window from which the piano was being tuned someone would start doing nude aerobics (as once happened to me when I was in New York), but alas (in common with the piece), nothing happened.

Happily then the company concluded with Page's sparkling master-work, Fearful Symmetries, set so incisively to the score of John Adams (the final American link in the chain). Set against Antony McDonalds's chameleon back-drop, it sparkles as it always has, its shapes and patterns evolving into symmetries which break and shatter. Erik Cavallari was on especially fine form and it makes a wonderful addition to Scottish Ballet's eclectic repertory.

Ian Palmer