TWOOLS 8

The eighth edition of TWOOLS makes do without the series of short, connecting group pieces that artistic director Ed Wubbe usually creates for Scapino's season finale.

Yet there are certainly connecting elements. Humour, for example, ranging from the flat to the uncomfortable. Thanks to the short production period, most of the pieces are characterised by a certain spontaneity and lightness.

Line Up by Liat Magnezy, the winner of the Scapiono Production Prize at last year's International Choreographers' Competition in Hannover, puts five dancers on a cramped disco floor and 'cuts' in their movements, as if they were dancing in the light of a stroboscope. In Wubbe's There's Nothing Funny About Herrman, three dancers embody the alienating scream-song of the Finnish male choir Mieskuore Huutajat.

"Oppressive under a sauce of lightness" is what AD reviewer Roos van Put calls Drowning Lessons by Jaakko Toivonen, who dresses his dancers in disproportionate tutus. With Geekspeak, Stephen Shropshire celebrates the nerd, including thick, dark glasses like the ones he has worn since he stopped dancing. And house choreographer Marco Goecke creates two choreographies in his characteristic, innovative dance idiom that is able to make the viewer shudder and smile at the same time: the duet Ring Them Bells to the song of the same name by Liza Minelli and the solo Äffi, in which Scapino dancer Tadayoshi Kokeguchi masters the subtle nuances of Goecke's language brilliantly.

An exception to all the lightness is the moving Dismantling Sivak, danced reflections on a suffocating love affair by Sjoerd Vreugdenhil. Perhaps the time has sunk in as well as the personal subject matter: it is an adapted version of a work previously created for the Life Aids Gala in Brussels.