Zany and sensory-rich: Scottish Dance’s Amethyst/TuTuMucky at The Place reviewed

The Barcelona-born choreographer Joan Clevillé has form for off-beat storytelling with a streak of sincerity. Before becoming artistic director of Scottish Dance Theatre in 2019, he led his own dance theatre company, where even his wackier creations took their caprices seriously enough to get audiences on board. Clevillé’s new commission for SDT, Amethyst by Mele Broomes of Project X Dance, is sketched in similar shades. Zany and sensory-rich, this vortex of warbling voice work and zigzag dancing tallies up to something sleeker than its scrappy parts.

The half-hour trio opens with Glenda Gheller on the mic, reciting a short speech about fragmentation — of stories, faces, perspectives, identities. ‘I feel like I am part of a fragmentation,’ she intones, repeating the line until it morphs from observation to mantra. Surrounded by sparkly rock formations, purple beams bouncing off her metallic boilersuit, she’s a galactic spectacle — and that’s before you factor in the trilling alien filter on the mic, which notches her voice up several octaves, à la ET. On paper, Gheller’s speech is shaggy, vague, but its meaning emerges in her delivery, not the sentences themselves. She dismantles and reassembles her monologue across the show, isolating phrases and emphasising their individual parts. She even adds melodies, twisting the words into something musical and emotive.

There’s less sensation in the dancing, which is likewise fragmented. Two men join Gheller for bursts of choreography that leap from breathy to fleet to choppy. We see slow-motion headspins and Matrix-style backbends, with leaps and wavy bellydances sprinkled in. The best scene involves a tarp, the dancers tussling underneath to create a craggy mountain that lumbers downstage. A poppy backbeat throbs as they crumble to the floor and reanimate as silhouettes, faces straining against the fabric.