Puzzles, Work, and Resolve

It’s absolutely wonderful seeing a company at the top of their game. Scottish Dance Theatre at forty is a force to be reckoned with. Having deservedly won the award for Best Mid-Scale Company at the 26th National Dance Awards in London, it's such an honour to see them performing in their home city venue.

Performance

Scottish Dance Theatre: “The Game Of Life” by Édouard Hue / ”Rotten Work” by Emilie Leriche

Place

Dundee Rep Theatre, Dundee, Scotland, June 19, 2026

Words

Lorna Irvine

Scottish Dance Theatre in “The Game Of Life” by Édouard Hue. Photograph by Brian Hartley

”Rotten Work” by Sweden-based choreographer Emilie Leriche, is based on a Tetris-like game, with all of the dancers trying to slot harmoniously together like puzzle pieces. Dressed in egalitarian GAP-style casual clothing, all whites, greys and blues, the ensemble attempt various groupings, then pairings, all focussed on communication, or the lack thereof. There are dancers falling, almost in slow motion, as others catch them like a trust exercise. Backs, ankles, and heads are gripped, lest they fall. Limbs spring up, from a prostrate position on the floor, like a hand going up in a classroom—the answer being offered to a tricky question.

The pace is mainly languid, lending an ethereal quality to the piece. Occasionally it's punctuated by short bursts of freestyle movement, sudden jolts of action as one, then a few others, spring up from a resting position. There are literal shapes being thrown here, like a cosmic geometry.

Behind the dancers is a line of clothes, which are tried on like new identities. Some of the garments are joined together. At various points, a dancer will stop, contemplate a blouse or t-shirt, and put one on, as though a form of cos-play.

Jonathan Soucasse’s dreamy, thrumming strings form a low hum in the auditorium, building into an ambient electronica piece that ricochets, creating a double heartbeat. It's absolutely beautiful.

As the motion is fragmented, so too are words muttered out loud: at first these are indecipherable, then they become clearer. Phrases like, “I remember falling” and ”If only we could“ land softly, tentatively. As the phrases become clear, so too does the momentum. The bodies taper out like long shadows, first in a tangle, then single file.

This could certainly be a visual metaphor for individualism, for personal autonomy. Or conversely, it's all about an interconnected society, and how we reach out to each other. Most likely though, it's both, a game of survival in our increasingly polarised society: the need for touch, connection, belonging, while still retaining our true natures.

Scottish Dance Theatre in ”Rotten Work” by Emilie Leriche. Photograph by Brian Hartley

Tick tock, tick tock . . . it goes on, and on, the clock sound, first the ticking, then a cuckoo clock chime—maddeningly, as if mocking everyone with ideas of the march to mortality. The clock is the jumping off point for “The Game Of Life” by Édouard Hue also unveiled for the first time tonight. The ensemble emulates clock hands with arms extended, working together with precision like factory workers. They are cogs in the machine, the worker ants. They jerk heads and arms in unison, then bunny hop around the floor. There's a folk flavour to some of the choreography, like Eastern European footwork. Elsewhere, it draws from more modern sources like hip hop dancing.

This is dance as contagion, as each dancer copies the other. It's the liminal space between viral dance as on social media, or virus as something we catch in real life. Leriche is exploring ideas around working to live versus living to work, asking wider questions about coming together for the collective good. Squint and some of the baggy earth coloured clothing could be sackcloth. But zoom in further and the clothing is marked with rectangular black shapes, creating a futuristic nuance to the costumes.

Suddenly the playfulness abates, and the mood takes a darker turn. Now, the dance vocabulary is more akin to a Saint Vitus Dance, a mad, thrashing movement. Bodies which were calm and regulated become manic and wild, no longer part of the uniformity of the working day.

The arrival halfway through the piece of Kassichana Okene-Jameson and Pauline Torzuoli reinforces the idea of dissent in the ranks. By performing more fluid work with graceful extensions, the pair's bid for a new way of living is introduced to the piece.

Now freed from the old restrictive ways of working in collaboration, the company of worker ants is now exploring, evolving, doing their own instinctive movement. The sense of gentle anarchy permeates throughout, and Wolff Bergen's music, so capricious and complex, delightfully glitches and scratches, trickling out all the way through the auditorium, creating a fantastic wall of sound.

We are indeed blessed to have the endlessly brilliant, innovative company—this double bill demonstrates their shape shifting quality.

Lorna Irvine

Based in Glasgow, Lorna was delightfully corrupted by the work of Michael Clark in her early teens, and has never looked back. Passionate about dance, music, and theatre she writes regularly for the List, Across the Arts and Exeunt. She also wrote on dance, drama and whatever particular obsession she had that week for the Shimmy, the Skinny and TLG and has contributed to Mslexia, TYCI and the Vile Blog.

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