Choreographers: Edouard Hue and Emilie Leriche
Celebrating its 40th birthday, Scottish Dance Theatre is touring a double bill of works created at Dundee Rep, with the choreographers exploring dance language and different forms of connection within communities. Focusing on contemporary dance styles and choreography, the two pieces created by Edouard Hue and Emilie Leriche have a kind of symbiosis that draws them together, building on ideas of support and resistance, help and burden, but the extended running time starts to work against the pairing.
Opening the evening, The Game of Life engages with notions of social function and control as individuals and groups form combinations. The extent to which they retain, choose or relinquish control of their individuality is at the heart of Hue’s 30-minute piece that adopts the beat of a clockwork mechanism which both delights and seems to determine what the dancers will do. Rarely in performance do the reactions of the dancers show them enjoying their activities and relishing the company of others, but here Hue’s bouncing, leaping and hopping cast have huge smiles on their faces as they interact.
It is a common approach to have a learning process in works about communities with one person discovering a new movement which the others copy, creating uniformity. But in The Game of Life, Hue expands this across the 30 minutes, moving from something tribal to a more rhythmic concept, a series of evolving shapes that filter through the body, expanding the gestures but also discovering the intimacy of pair work. A piece full of tonal shifts and contemplative moments, The Game of Life is both joyous and sinister.
Its partner piece Rotten Work by Leriche does some of the same learning and repetition across its slightly longer 35 minutes, asking the dancers to support one another whether they want to or not. A visibly dourer piece, this asks about the benefits and burden of community, which Leriche achieves through a series of complex tableaux, fitting the large cast together in ways that often look like a game of Twister, all with individual choreography, finding their way to one another for a moment of intertwined pose.
And there are lots of interesting moments in here as dancers react to each other’s touch and appearance in negative and positive ways, often taking defensive or aggressive gestures and, through contact flow, turning them into opportunities for support – sometimes almost flinging them off into the arms of someone else who will help them. This gives Rotten Work a more staccato flavour than its companion piece, but Leriche overreaches in the final 10 minutes with a frustratingly repetitive concluding chapter that adds little but time to an evening that promises 80 minutes but runs at 95 minutes in practice.
Elements of Rotten Work remain confusing; the change of shirts at some point through the performance is never clear, while the clarity of the spoken segments only comes towards the end, often obscured by the music and movement. It’s a shame to end a celebratory event at the choreographic partnership’s lowest point, but as both creatives show, life brings its disappointments in the end.
Reviewed on 24 October 2026 and continues to tour
The Reviews Hub Star Rating