Sat 7 Feb: Room Dance Company, Kirstin Halliday and Lilah Bobak

Room Dance Company Room

Lilah Bobak remains still

Kirstin Halliday Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1

We are immediately served a visual treat on entering the theatre, as long red threads emanate out from a centre trio of dancers like spokes on the wheel of life. Exploring the theme of rebirth, Room takes us on a journey of growth. The red-thread installation and entangled movement language combine with RuaridhSummer’s sound design to evoke the embrace of a womb. The piece is gentle and tender, showcasing the lithe and agile quality of the dancers. I was often reminded of a flower, its petals opening and folding, in undulating movement. I only wished that the lighting was slightly more generous at times, the opening solo particularly hard to see.

Bobak’s noise-rock band, Green Star, drives remains still with warping electric guitar. The music is matched by the blatant invitation to look at the dancers, their confrontational eye line to the audience reading as a challenge. I really enjoyed this strong focus and wanted to see more of it in the dancers’ solos, which were internalised. It is refreshing to see a dance piece that celebrates dance, without the need for complex meaning and probing narratives, yet as a whole the piece lacks cohesiveness. Bobak’s costume design, demanding restriction by tethering two dancers together, could be really exciting if developed further and if commitment to the use of the design remained throughout the piece.

Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1 outwardly serves exactly what it says on the tin. Lights come up on two lizard-costumed dancers lying prone upstage, complete with tails. A single clawed hand moves - the audience is transfixed. Some of the tension is broken by comedic captioning, explaining each little musical addition and shift. And then the lizards’ tongues start moving. Audible laughter ripples around the theatre, testament to the commitment and execution of ‘lizard body language’. After a (captioned) narrator explains that the cloned females must still ‘go through the motions’, we see it play out on stage, increasingly in slow motion (eeeevenn theee caaaaptionsss). The lights fade to black before coming up on a post-coital scene, the two lizards reclining on rocks to the sounds of building Bossa nova. A joy to watch in what felt like farcical escapism, but with underlying questions about gender and the fetishization of lesbians.

Lauren O'Sullivan

As ever, Resolution challenges your expectations: on paper, what looked to be a rather earnest and educational dance bill turned out to be a night embracing thoughtful, absorbing, and ultimately fun ideas that sent me home more than encouraged.

Opening the night was Room Dance Company, which is just as well, as it takes three hours to set up the props for Room, their thoughtful reflections on birth and rebirth. The prop is a huge and intricate circle of red and white knotted ropes, which represent a placenta, with three dancers at the centre; to consider them triplets might be taking it all too literally. To watery and heartbeat sounds, we get some beguilingly fluid and tumbling movement (more please), as the placenta also embarks on its own tangled journey. However, dramatically, Room could feel rather opaque, and odd lighting possibly added to the confusion, even if it was danced with polished conviction by the four-strong company.

Fluid movement was also the likable hallmark of Lilah Bobak'sremains still. Not often seen at Resolution, it's a work that responds to its music and costume design — how great to focus on choreography. The music, from Green Star, is guitar-led, dense and darkly catchy. It works well for Bobak — no surprise, since she is the bassist with the band! — and her trio of dancers, particularly when all four perform together with urgent brio. However, some solos, and particularly certain sections with long fabric lengths joining dancers 3 m apart, felt rather thin and laboured. But Bobak is a stage magnet and has something in the lively way she animates groups.

Count me happily flabbergasted by Kirstin Halliday'sDesert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1. Premiered last year, it's the first part of what will be a triptych "...exploring the fetishization of lesbians and the active reconfiguration of the cisheteronormative male gaze," which doesn't sound so much fun at all. However, Halliday, together with co-choreographer and dancer Aniela Piasecka, delivers amusingly goofy physical theatre as they animate a lecture on the all-female species of Whiptail Lizards and, with deadpan accuracy, delightfully reveal their procreative humping process and postcoital boredom. The action is delivered with terrific costume design (Sgàire Wood), set/video (Molly M. Whawell) and sound (Char Bickley) — this is super-polished work, and I look forward to seeing more from Glasgow-based Halliday.

Bruce Marriott