The show was a special fundraiser to get this company to Glasgow next year, it having been chosen to participate in YDance, the inaugural Commonwealth Youth Dance Festival.

Marian McDermott started off the group 5 years ago to give a good grounding for and encourage those of her students who might like to continue with contemporary dance work beyond high school.  They are now twelve strong, with ages from 15 to 17, and it seems that all have been dancing since a young age and so should be welcomed into a tertiary course – particularly as five of the current dancers were able enough to choreograph pieces for this show.

They decided to make a show around the theme of escape, with each dance based on a different aspect of this theme, and during the gaps between the nine items they turned on short, mostly visual, skits or fun items such as encircling the audience with red and white “danger – keep out” plastic tape to keep us entertained.

The five pieces coming from group members, with one exception, showed a tendency to use ballet as the base movement vocabulary, and might show a series of different moves, rather than having one movement come out of or flow into another.  Monica Logan’s Apparatus  was the one that used its own set of angular, energetic movements (and a unison sway!) to cheerfully picture the dancers as equipment or machinery  .  Each piece managed good grouping and mixes of dancers, and this with a pretty small stage to deal with.

Beside the five members’ pieces, two came from former members.  Gemma Herbison produced a lively, easy to read piece and had the dancers posturing like models, with their lovely long hair, responding to the pressures of magazine images.  Can they escape the pressure to be in fashion?  Probably not – they were having too much fun!

The other piece, from now professional Grace Woollett, was to look at the difficulty in escaping, not, this time, external pressures, but the internal ones coming from awareness of personal limitation.  Using all 12 dancers, she played with regrouping them into fours and sixes, one line walking, another dancing – at times together, at other times haphazardly.  A fine job, but I can’t say that I picked up this brave theme.

Two professional choreographers also provided pieces for the dancers, each using the full group.

Georgie Goater’s piece was called Unbrace and its theme turned around escape from commitment.  So we saw a girl answer a mobile call by saying that she was performing, but who nevertheless then left the stage!  At times employing strong interchanges to strong music, the movement always flowed whether it was a cannon which one dancer avoided, or a very telling picture where two dancers embrace, with one then slipping away from the other who stands alone with empty arms.

The final piece, from Jessie McCall, was Wake Up, and it started with what looked like a large holiday pup tent in the middle of the stage.  From this erupted and returned one or another and it was clear that the tent was full of people, that is, until there was a shout of “Spiders!” and it emptied out.  The tent became two large sheets to be used as shelter or to have fun with.

The group achieved a uniformly good standard of movement that makes them a tight ensemble. No one stands out as being a better dancer than the others – perhaps this is not surprising considering how long they have all been dancing!

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