Dance

Scottish Ballet

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

Five Stars

When Crystal Pite’s Emergence blazed onto the stage during this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, it was coupled up with Angelin Preljocaj’s all-male endurance test MC 14/22 (Ceci est mon corps). For the Autumn Tour, however, Scottish Ballet have looked closer to home for a piece to sit alongside Pite’s seething evocation of swarm mentality in dynamic motion: that piece is the newly premiered Sibilo by company member Sophie Laplane.

Four women and four men cluster in an initial ensemble where Laplane’s sharp-sculpted, rapid angularities hint at busy, almost over-regulated lives. As couples emerge, the score increasingly lives up to the title, Sibilo (it’s Latin for ‘whistle’). Sometimes a piercing, referee-ing blast initiates change, but mostly the mix of music and whistling creates a nuanced mood-board for Laplane’s cunning jigsaw of relationships.

Think of Lauren Bacall’s  line “If you want me, just whistle...”   – a similar, teasing frisson of sexual come-on runs through Laplane’s choreography, even when the sassy, agile signals are ignored or unrequited. There’s so much high-class invention crammed into just thirty minutes: a cartoon-y vaudeville duet, male doublework where the slipping in and out of one jacket speaks volumes, and more sly fun when - at the peep of a whistle - costumes are whisked away on wires. Cleverest of all, though, is how the jauntiness, the rivalries and games-play all tell recognisable stories of what whistles up togetherness.

A surprise curtain-raiser saw Christopher Harrison - tip-tilted backwards  as if in an astronaut’s chair, with his limbs slow-floating weightlessly - in Jack Webb’s solo Drawn to Drone, seen earlier this year at Cottier’s when Webb himself was in the chair. With Emergence showing the entire company on-stage - so sharp, so precise in Pite’s uncanny, insect-like moves - this really is Scottish Ballet at the top of its game.