Dance International Glasgow 2025
Tramway, Glasgow

CLOSE by Tramway’s entrance I sampled the Nicaraguan Elyla artist’s curated dance film programme and hence an elaboration of cock-fighting. The creatures were beautiful, their movement perfect. Then carnage. An invigilator had alerted me to how this could be gruesome. A warning about the absence of safe dancing was deemed unnecessary.

DIG is a layered thing, couched in the venture of wending to vital venues across Glasgow’s hybrid zones of grandeur, jarring neglect, weathered graffiti and utility. It felt additionally resonant when, in Dance Is Not For Us (★★★★★), the soloist Omar Rajeh’s text initially drew attention to the larger urban choreography of audience arrival, acknowledging a happenstance of planning and chance. He later offered possession of elements of his set design, hence distribution and a nourished choreography of dispersal.

A floorbound installation of fragrant foliage greeted the entry of Rajeh’s audience. This time it was basil punnets. We had duly bedded in, expecting something of a certain ilk.

It’s refreshing how there’s nothing prefigured or aesthetically determined in the honest mature body of soloist Omar Rajeh. His every impulse comprises a free and vivid choice. He drums out an intense dance of a thousand volatile things and more, during which he is, by turns, stroboscopic, urgent, pliant and transcendent.

Maqamat’s production deploys projected words to contextualise and frame the dancing. Writing spools out to delineate solid concepts and insurmountable factors. The procedure underlines how the ground for innovative artwork is of course unstable as, all around, carefully built infrastructures diminish and vanish.

While cultural vandalism is always injurious, dancing might imply the healing of scars and trend toward a kind of amelioration through performance. But that can’t be all. The scope can be much wider. Omar Rajeh has chosen to be radically explicit and has committed to lucid provocation.

We come to know how the circumstances of his Beirut culture have been violent, tragic and crushing and we feel how his consequent stage action acts upon us. Because his communication is so visceral, respite, when we get there, is heightened – practically celestial.

On the edge of funny and sticking to its guns, Bottoms (★★★) played later in the evening immersing us in the aesthetic of a village hall where a makeshift community dons generic gear to investigate can-can and its famous Offenbach tune. Their bind of skill accomplishes lyrical moments amid valiant chunks of hopping about and eloquent gaps. Episodically, and in real time, the cast imbibe fizzy drinks while panting dies down and the pulse of the unsung defiantly re-asserts.

With B-movie tendency, this show, choreographed by Bulgarian Katerina Radeva and performed by Two Destination Language comprises a calculated airing of fey aspirations and a sense of borderline belligerent folk assuming their turn.

Bottoms ends with house-lights up and an auction of artworks its leader has energetically inked at the show’s margins. Akin to this show’s main tranche, the sell-off reveals a droll divide (or is it cleavage?) whereby some punters are gleefully buying while others sit deadpan.

That many attendees are also still clutching their basil seedlings is a matter unique DIG genius, invoking subversion, indictment or just a sense of joining-in. Performance that is immortal and gives you goosebumps can be adjacent to all sorts at a place like Glasgow’s Tramway during DIG and I can’t recommend a punt more highly.

Runs until May 24. Box office: 0141 276 0950, tramway.org