Coiscéim Dance Theatre, Knots

Review in Issue 18-4 | Winter 2006

Six cubicles, with perspex walls, each with its own exit sign at the back and a white draw-curtain at the front. Two white trolley-beds at either side of the stage and microphones hanging above the beds and the cubicles. A dance mix of Eurythmics' Love is a Stranger plays loudly as the audience enter. Three women enter in white wedding dresses, each with a man sitting on her train and facing backwards. Then a dance in the cubicles to a driving soundtrack, personal' stories, verbal abuse, everything hingeing on personal relationships and seeded with quotations from R.D. Laing's Knots. But these seeds didn't flourish in the performance; they weren't really worked into the choreography, or into the personal stories

The final wedding sequence ought to have been bitterly ironic but it seemed that the tying of the knot was an escape from those destructive psychological and emotional knots with which we can torture ourselves

Knots is a strong piece of dance-based physical theatre and there are some powerful moments of image, movement and emotion, but it doesn't really get under the skin.

Presenting Artists
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Feb 2006

This article in the magazine

Issue 18-4
p. 30