Photos: Lewis Landini
WIG stands for a Weekend of Improvisation in Glasgow, featuring some of Scotland’s best dancers and musicians, and this is my round-up of Saturday night.
The team from Something Smashing provide conversations between bodies. There’s a freewheeling, eccentric energy here. Skye Reynolds and Alma Lindenhovious move like a crustacean, with Alma on Skye’s back like a protective shell. Mic work and freestyling at a frenetic pace means it has a capricious logic of its own.
From the Glasgow Jam, Monika Smekot is trying to slide the entire floor space, without rising or bumping into wires. It’s challenging, but she does it with grace and wit, before making the audience reconsider presence, inner space and the dimensions of the room.
Starting from her physical attributes, in this case hands, Dundee based- dancer Stephanie Arsoska (from Third Thread) considers identity, home and the relative merits of porridge without milk. It’s funny and sweet, and her performance is feline, smart and self-aware without being self-indulgent.
Jer Reid and Alex South from Collective Endeavours play a piece of music which almost makes time stand still. From unconventional cymbal work, to a ritualistic approach to movement, using the ebb and flow of Reid’s looped honey liquid guitar and South’s gorgeous staccato clarinet playing, the room seems to melt away.
Melbourne artist Kim McClelland is a sprightly sprite. She interrogates her Bangladesh roots, moving spontaneously and disarming through humour, while discussing authenticity and identity.
ICEBERG are Zoe Katsilerou, Penny Chivas and Eilon Morris. This piece interrogates how memories can at once cocoon us and yet all too often be unreliable. Chivas seems to be making calligraphy in the air, and Katsilerou mirrors her, before she balances somewhat precariously on drummer Morris. Katsilerou also sings beautifully in tribute to Greek roots and migration.
Forever pitched between fragmentary gesture and delicate flirtations with narrative, it’s a poignant, playful end to the evening.
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