Years ago I was talking to Robert Lepage, one of the greatest exponents of physical theatre, about the difference between dancers and actors. He was in the middle of his collaboration with Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant on Eonnagata and he couldn’t get over the contrasts between them. “Dancers are different animals than actors or writers,” he told me. “Creative impulses come from the body, from muscles, from movement. You have to let yourself go into this flow.”
I thought about that conversation when I was watching Alan Cumming in Burn, in which the actor makes his dance debut at the age of 57. Cumming would light up any club dancefloor. Put him on a stage in a play such as The Bacchae or a musical such as Cabaret and ask him to move, and he will do so beautifully. But place him at the centre of a piece that communicates principally through movement and the result is unsatisfying.
Brought to the Edinburgh international festival by the National Theatre of Scotland, Burn tells the story of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, through his letters, an occasional snatch of poetry and a lot of choreography by Steven Hoggett and Vicki Manderson, accompanied by a passionate score by the Scottish composer Anna Meredith.
Cumming, dashing in long black hair, black waistcoat and knickerbockers (costumes by Katrina Lindsay), waves his arms fitfully, pulling shapes out of the air with his hands; he jigs and capers and collapses on the stage as Burns’s depression overcomes him. He’s energetic, and the moments of jagged physicality, where the wildness of his gestures overwhelm his ability to control them, are striking. But he doesn’t do that key thing dance does, which is to transmute thinking and feeling into physical realisation. The movement feels applied to the performance rather than being the essence of it.
Without a script provided by the steps, there isn’t much of a story at all. If you didn’t know anything about Burns, I doubt you’d be able to piece together much of his astonishing life, his journey from ploughman to poet, his constant plunges into despair and abject poverty, from this impressionistic selection of words. Certainly, you wouldn’t understand the importance of his poetry, which is in short supply.
What you are left with is Cumming’s undoubted charisma, his ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand with a look and a smile. He’s supported by a production of staggering beauty. Against a backcloth of Andrzej Goulding’s monochrome video projections, which combine scenes and dates from Burns’s life with a ghostly image of a white horse, designer Ana Inés Jabares-Pita and lighting director Tim Lutkin provide a scene of storm and tempest, and light shooting through clouds.
Illusion consultant Kevin Quantum adds a feather quill that scribbles furiously on its own, and a pile of paper that rises magically to take the form of one of Burns’s supporters. Chairs slide into place and tilt back as if floating. A line of shoes is suspended from the flies, each one representing one of the many women the poet seduces. It is imaginative and carefully wrought, but it’s curiously empty.
Ballet Freedom from Freedom Ballet of Ukraine was my surprise on a brief visit to the festival. This darkly sensual show, a sort of cross between a dirty version of Matthew Bourne and Pina Bausch, features some very dodgy sexual politics, but it is gloriously danced by people who have trained for years to feel movement in their bones.
Dark moments punctuate a mood of raucous erotica. In one, a waiter hears a gunshot and then bonelessly swivels to look at himself in a mirror, his limbs like jelly. At another, a girl’s body falls from a wardrobe; three men in turn dance with her limp body before stuffing her back into the space. In the context of the war in Ukraine, such casual acts of violence feel doubly chilling. It’s a show that lingers in the mind.
Star ratings (out of five)
Burn ★★★
Ballet Freedom ★★★★
Ballet Freedom is at the Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh, until 28 August
