Dance review round-up: And Then, One Thousands Years of Peace, Mephisto Waltz, Remember Me

WHERE to begin with a ballet that ends with two bleating lambs sniffing around a stage covered with sodden flags? To industrial beats by techno legend Laurent Garnier? It’s like Danny Boyle’s Olympics Opening Ceremony gone even more weird. Then again, perhaps Angelin Prejlocaj’s gripping post-apocalyptic ­vision has just as much to teach us about ourselves.

And then, one thousand years 
of peace is a thrilling odyssey through the history of apocalypse, rendered as a series of exquisite images of war and ritual, peace and learning, strife and sex. A large-scale and flawlessly danced ballet, it is the result of what happens when you take a choreographer from Western Europe renowned for his lengthy improvisations to the Bolshoi, home of the most rigorously trained classical ballet dancers in the world. You would expect an almighty clash (in fact two of the dancers were so liberated by the process, they returned to Aix-en-Provence with Preljocaj). Instead you get a ­harmony of opposites.

The first half is exceptional. The dancers wear nude leotards and move in a dynamic ensemble, cradling themselves one moment, spinning their arms like Catherine wheels the next. They writhe under plastic sheets and stalk the stage like stick insects, elbows and buttocks raised. Then Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata begins and with it a heart-wrenchingly beautiful, almost-but-not-quite classical duet. Watching these two ­female dancers of purposefully different sizes and technique, you understand Preljocaj’s Pina Bausch-esque maxim that every dancer in his company is a soloist.

But there are issues with pacing. The second half feels a bit like a greatest hits of humanity. Religion? Done. Violence? Done. Hope? Done. It starts to feel repetitive. Until, that is, the spectacular finale. Chains rain down on dancers like spears, just missing their bodies. A row of basins leads to a water fight, or perhaps a baptism of the new world? Dancers slide down the slippery stage, then slap flags on the ground. Finally, the lambs trot into view. Serenity never looked so strange.

Mind you, even this looked like your average episode of Springwatch next to Mephisto Waltz by Derevo. This St Petersburg troupe are renowned for their odd, atmospheric and aesthetic work, and this latest offering is no exception. My advice is ­ignore the pretentious programme notes (“maybe it’s the madness of a world where people still make wars that divide the Gods”) and just sit down and let the wave of anarchy wash over you, or perhaps break all over your head. Oh, and only sit in the front row if you like the scent of watermelon. And the sight of a sausage cigar.

Beautiful images abound across a stage dappled with light and stormed with detritus. Through the course of a surprisingly short 80 minutes, the group of five shaven-headed performers roll in wet clay, wave butterflies on sticks, whirl like dervishes, waltz like warped marionettes, and wear nests around their necks, their bald heads becoming giant eggs. It’s mad stuff yet the movement is bound by all sorts of rules, combining Japanese butoh, mime, dance performance art, and something that’s ­entirely Derevo.

In the eye of the storm is Mephistopheles himself (or is he a scarecrow? Or a babe? Or a harbinger of death? And what’s with the melting snowman?). He gyrates and leaps and gorges on watermelon in a spellbinding performance. Most of the time I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but that’s sort of the point of a work of pure anarchy.

Over at Summerhall, the venue that everyone’s talking about this year, there isn’t as much dance and physical theatre as you would hope. Remember Me by Teatro Sineglossa is a slight piece – what else could it be at 20 minutes long – but it contains one of the most beautiful images I’ve seen on the Fringe this year.

The audience is seated in front of a mirror in the Black Tent. Then all goes pitch black. Now, as our eyes adjust to a dull light we see a woman trapped behind the glass, staring out at us with sad eyes. Now she is further away, down a hall of mirrors, in a new space that may or may not be an illusion. Darkness again.

Finally, as a yowling, atonal version of Purcell’s Dido And Aeneas strikes up, the image appears. The light returns, brighter and colder. The woman is naked, undulating and contorting her torso. But is she a woman or a man? First we see the tiny waist and breasts of a female, then the triangular chest of a male. They dip in and out of the light, moving in symbiosis, the genders fusing in what becomes a meditation on grief, memory and the fact of the continuing body. It ends all too soon, but it stays with me long after the lights go up.

And then, one thousand years of peace, Playhouse, run ended; Mephisto Waltz, Assembly Roxy, ends tomorrow; Remember Me, Summerhall, ends today.