Anger management classes

What The Body... left its audiences almost as drained as the dancers. It also left a few observers wondering if it was a brilliant one-off, if Vandekeybus could sustain the giddy momentum or if, like a freewheeling rollercoaster ride, this maverick talent would quickly run out of steam. A return visit to New Moves in 1992 with Always The Same Lies, a touching, absurdist, though no less physical portrait of the choreographer’s friend, 89-year-old Carlo Verano, indicated that Vandekeybus had staying power. Later this week he returns to the scene of his triumphant British debut - New Moves having morphed into New Territories - to present his latest work, Scratching the Inner Fields. It is a title which suggests Vandekeybus is still concerned with getting under the skin of human emotion.

"I think I am still busy with the same obsessions," he tells me. "But now I look for different forms. That is why I started to use a lot of text and make films."

Indeed, it was as much Vandekeybus’s use of multi-media forms as his ‘Eurocrash’ physicality which spawned a host of imitators across Europe and beyond. So successful were his layered, adrenaline-charged works on the international touring circuit, the Vandekeybus ‘look’ - characterised by ordinary-looking young people wearing ordinary-looking clothes, chucking each other around in scenes intercut with passages of dialogue and film clips - became the common language of a generation of dance-makers from Portugal to Poland. Yet none have the eye for telling detail or sheer theatrical bravura of Vandekeybus. Nor do they lurk in the shadowy recesses of humanity to quite such disturbing effect.

While there are moments of wry humour in his work, chaos and a darkness of spirit seems to be the common denominator in Vandekeybus’s oeuvre. He seems a cheerful enough person when you meet him, but since a gloomily obsessive quality can also be seen in works by his compatriots Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker and Alain Platel, is it possible this is a Flemish thing?

"There is a darkness," he says. "But I think what we have in common comes more from another angle. As creators we were not so much influenced by the American way of seeing dance - the abstractions. My movement is more accidental, chaotic if you like. This springs from emotions. It is not that I am unhappy, but rage, fear, frustration and desire are very real emotions. For me, humour and lightness comes extra. I want to show that in the work, but if it comes after crying it is much more beautiful than to see it from someone who is always smiling.

"Deep down I am an optimist. I believe in life and I believe in people. But I think in our work we allow ourselves the darker side."

By all accounts, Scratching the Inner Fields is pretty dark, even by Vandekeybus’s standards. His first piece created for an all-female cast of seven performers, the work follows his all-male In Spite of Wishing and Wanting and sees the choreographer return to a more intimate scale after a period working with ever-larger ensembles. With this piece, he says, he has stripped away the filmed interludes and complex scenarios and "gone to the head".

"Scratching the Inner Fields shows the violence of an emotion or inner state rather than physical violence. There is emotion. There is ecstatic expression. But it is not throwing bricks." Is this, I wonder, because he is working with a group of women, or part of the maturing process - that life itself is less about the physical?

"It is certainly connected. As you get older you read more, you experience more, you start to work differently - working with texts taught me how to direct people in a very complete way, not just play on the energy. But I don’t think this has come from working with the women. Actually, the physicality of the women is almost primitive. The men’s show was more tender."

Rather, this new development in Vandekeybus’s work is, he says, partly fuelled by the desire to connect more fully with the audience. Weary of large-venue spectacles he wants to get back to basics again - his next show, he tells me, will be a solo for an audience of 25 or so - and he’s happy that Scratching the Inner Fields will be seen in the relative intimacy of Tramway.

"I miss the communication. At the end, dance - or whatever we choose to call what we do on stage - is to do with communication. And it is a two-way thing. We give, and we take back. We must never forget this."

Ultima Vez perform Scratching the Inner Fields at Tramway, Glasgow (0141-287 5511), on Saturday and Sunday, at 7.30pm

NEW TERRITORIES

FUNDING may be at the root of Nikki Milican’s decision to combine the two Glasgow performance festivals she has directed for over a decade - the cutting edge New Moves dance season and the more radical National Review of Live Art - under the banner of New Territories, but the ethos which underpins both events makes some sense of the merger. Over the years both events have produced nuggets of pure gold along with the inevitable dross, but in this arena of work you really can’t have one without the other and Milican’s taste in the artists she supports is usually spot-on.

Whether there will be much crossover between the live art audience who will flock to the NRLA platforms at Glasgow’s Arches this week (Wednesday-Sunday) and contemporary dance fans who can enjoy a range of events over the next five weeks, remains to be seen. There are, I suspect, plenty of performances to engage both camps; indeed, there are events which I’d recommend to mainstream dance and theatre audiences. Whether they will embrace the new is another matter. As Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet chief executive Christopher Barron pointed out in these pages last week, British audiences tend to like their performance arts neatly categorised.

Yet where do you draw the lines when respected dancer/choreographer Rosemary Butcher fetches up in the NRLA programme with the Scottish premiere of her new work, Scan (Arches, Wednesday and Thursday) and Station House Opera’s Mare’s Nest (Tramway March 8, 9) shares the final week of the festival with two of Quebec’s most acclaimed dance groups, Sylvain Emard Danse and O Vertigo?

The return of Wim Vandekeybus (see above) is keenly anticipated, as is the Glasgow debut of Hungary’s Artus, (Noah’s Trilogy, RSAMD, February 20-23) who will perform the complete version of a work seen, in part, at the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

One of the most thrilling spectacles promises to be Materiali Resistenti Dance Factory’s Waterwall (Tramway, February 27-March 1), a high-energy encounter between aerial gymnasts and (you guessed it) a wall of water. Think vertical synchronised swimming in harnesses under a very large shower. Drier, in more ways than one, is Paulo Ribeiro’s wryly expressive dance. The Portuguese choreographer has a distinctive, gently melancholic style and his Sad Europeans - Joussez Sans Entraves (Tramway, March 5, 6), marks a welcome return to Glasgow.

With the British premiere of Emard’s Scenes d’Interieur (Tramway, March 12, 13) and O Vertigo’s Luna (Tramway March 15, 16) closing the season, the range of international work on offer at New Territories is as good - if not better - than anything we’ve seen at past events.