Latest news with #MaryBrennan
The Herald Scotland
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: The Violet Hour, at the DIG festival, is a real 'wow' show
Dance The Violet Hour DIG at Tramway, Glasgow Mary Brennan four stars Twilight…when tricks of the altering light can make you question what you see. Or what you think you see. This slippage between what's real, and what randomly exists in your mind's eye, is one of the fascinating undercurrents in Colette Sadler's latest dance-work, The Violet Hour, seen - for one night only - at this year's DIG. Three dancers - Leah Marojevic, Samir Kennedy and Maëva Barthelot - bring Sadler's mesh of intriguing concepts before us with an unflagging devotion to detail that is simply astounding. At first, all three are 'marooned' on a narrow downstage dias - bodies close but, as yet, not touching. Marojevic is the first to step down and slowly test out the unknown terrain - a projection of an arid landscape at sunrise is the backdrop to her gradual discovery of how her own body behaves, stretching and balancing as the day fades into night.
The Herald Scotland
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Glasgow 2025: Cunningham opens the festival in memorable fashion
Dance: Songs of the Wayfarer DIG at Tramway, Glasgow Mary Brennan Five stars 'I will find a way…' True to her word, she does. For Claire Cunningham has ever seen adversity - in whatever guise - as an adjunct to creativity that explores the very heart of our being. This time, opening Dance International Glasgow 2025, she's rallying us to go hiking with her - she's already kitted out! Boots on, backpack, her everyday crutches to hand, and a map. In fact, the map is a music score - Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer. Cunningham will sing snatches of it throughout the piece, her (classically trained) voice soaring high and pure - like untainted mountain air. Off she goes. Counting steps, her crutches adding tempos of their own, as she negotiates the ins and outs of the Tramway space, her movements and body language morphing it into a landscape of rocky outcrops and steep inclines. We - like the group on on-stage beanbags - stay seated, but Cunningham's astutely nuanced physicality connects us into her travels and travails. We feel the effort and concentration when - crutches discarded - she wriggles and stretches and crawls across the floor until she finds shelter among the waiting peaks of inter-locking crutches. But it's when, on her crutches, she climbs over row by row of Tramway's seating tiers that her valiant endeavours are at their most poignant. She perches high up. Scanning the view, she rests. Then speaks, with quiet affable dignity, of grief, loss and cherished memories - her words echoed in the graceful BSL signing of Yvonne Waddell. And yes, her outlook is from the perspective of being disabled, but her meditative reflections on the how's and why's of an unpredictable journey through life apply to us all… Her performance is subtly embedded in projected images of cascading waters, of pathways drawn across the floor, of words streamed across an upstage screen - all ensuring we find a way to share in her melancholy, her joy, her resilient humour. Memorable, moving and inspirational.
