The stage is set simply: two long tables with white tops, a cup and saucer placed centrally on each, and behind one, prim and petite, sits Diana Payne-Myers. She is the eponymous Carmel, celebrating her 80th year with a family gathering that exposes truths and tests assumptions, and within which the life-enhancing benefits of dance are central. Two younger dancers, Vince Virr and Jade Adamson, have a lovers’ tryst around and about the tables. Matthew Hawkins, in a dad’s cardigan, is a benign presence, and Natasha Gilmore with her scene stealing baby Otis completes the professional company.
Tabletops become screens for films of a range of mothers and fathers, all dancers in their own way. Their chat charts the ebb and flow of family life, from the loving and nurturing of their babies, to their disappointments and regrets. These on-screen lives are a powerful counterpoint to the dance on stage. The choreography is fluid and rhythmic as in groups, duets and solos each family member expresses an emotional response to Carmel’s strength and frailty, and to the new baby in the family. A further dimension is added through a dancing chorus of people from Edinburgh. Mixed in age, gender, size and ability they are a warm and happy gang – the extended family perhaps. Again, the movement is perfectly matched to tell this story with tableaux and some fine show-off party pieces.
As a piece that sets out to explore cross-generational attitudes to dance it certainly achieves its goals. The dance is lovely to watch, the use of space and the interweaving of film and chorus very well managed. There is the added frisson of a toddler on stage, and Natasha fairly heavily pregnant, and an eighty year-old who can do the splits with ease but has the frame of a bird. These take it a touch beyond sentimentality. Most moving for me was the final filmed scene of the on-screen contingent, dancing together rather than being talking heads, showing their signature styles. Hats off too to Quee Macarthur’s original music, which, together with some well chosen pop-numbers, made me feel like dancing.
