NEW MOVES DANCE DANCE SCOTTISH BALLET IS PREPARING TO FLIT

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Sep 16, 2007 | by BARRY DIDCOCK

FOLLOWING its acclaimed Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) performances, Scottish Ballet heads north this month for a short autumn season at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen. And who knows, when the company returns to Glasgow it may find an exciting new chapter in its history opening: with GBP10 million already banked, the company needs just GBP1m more to secure its move to purpose- built headquarters within Glasgow's Tramway. To that end a final fund-raising campaign was launched earlier this month by the broadcaster Kirsty Wark. If all goes to plan, the company will be in its new home by the end of next year.

Until then, though, there's dancing afoot.

Sadly there's no place in the Aberdeen programme for Stephen Petronio's Ride The Beast, a new piece performed to music by Radiohead and the highlight of last month's festival show. But Fearful Symmetries does make the cut. Created by Scottish Ballet's artistic director Ashley Page during his tenure at the Royal Ballet in 1994, it will finish the Aberdeen set as it did the EIF.

The other three pieces in the quartet of works to be performed in Aberdeen are George Balanchine's Apollo (from 1928, performed to a score by Stravinsky); Jerome Robbins's Afternoon Of A Faun (from 1953, but a re-working of a 1912 Nijinksy piece with a score by Debussy); and a new work, Chasing Ghosts, choreographed by Australian soloist, Diana Loosmore.

Her piece is the joker in the pack, though it may also be the most keenly anticipated. It's only her second choreographed work but the first, last year's duet Sirocco, was performed on the autumn tour and won her the Peter Darrell Choreographic Award. Grander in scale than Sirocco, Chasing Ghosts features seven dancers and a score cut from a track by DJ/producer Ian Simmonds, who founded Acid Jazzers The Sandals and later worked with Leftfield.

It would be wrong to say America is the theme of the autumn season but it is certainly a presence, as it was with the festival show. Page's piece is danced to a score by American composer John Adams and evokes the space and height of American cities.

Balanchine, of course, founded the New York City Ballet and Jerome Robbins's most memorable choreography was for the films On The Town and West Side Story. He too worked with New York City Ballet.

As usual, then, a carefully thought-through set, with the august in the form of Balanchine and Robbins offsetting the shock of the new in Loosmore.

Scottish Ballet's Autumn Season is at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen from September 20-22