Dance review: Humanimalia

HER chosen subject are primates, but nobody could accuse Janis Claxton of monkeying around. The Edinburgh-based choreographer has spent the past four years researching our nearest relatives, leading to three fascinating dance works.

The first came in 2008, when Claxton and her dancers took up residence in Edinburgh Zoo with Fringe show Enclosure 44 – Humans, and she followed that with Human Animal, performed in theatre foyers, where passers-by were invited to engage with the species known as "dancer".

Now the work has finally arrived on a theatrical stage, and Humanimalia feels like a very natural progression. Five dancers share the space with two Perspex enclosures, one large, one small. Over the course of 70 minutes, the group dynamic twists and turns, with Tamsyn Russell emerging as an alpha female few would mess with. The others cower around her, or engage in playful escapades until she cuts them dead with a single glance.

Claxton's choreography cleverly switches between fluid movement, brushed with the subtlest of ape-like touches, to full-on primate activity in the enclosures. Rarely losing eye contact, the dancers are always in relationship with each other, running the gamut of emotions from fear and frustration to happiness and love.

The slow reveal of shadowy figures on the back wall gives us pause for thought, when it turns out to be us, projected via real-time video, while the striking closing image, of a dancer's bare breast covered in raw meat, ponders the notion that but for that two per cent of different DNA, we too could be somebody's dinner.