Tonight's triple bill found a breakdancing quartet in Palette, mapping and painting their movements as a disparate drawing was formed, sandwiched between two similarly science-themed contemporary pieces, Chemistry and Heart of Matter.

Joe Lott's Chemistry, in response to Mendeleev's dream of the elements and how the periodic table came to existence, evoked a vision of dancing atoms that, as the music shifted in dynamic, sparkled with gestural nuances. Two male and three female dancers grouped and split, shifting in and out of unison in a play of dancing particles fusing and separating to eventually form the elements in re-ordered pairs. Creating order out of more and more chaos through both floor patterns and dynamic expression would clarify and charge what was already there with the intensity and power associated with chemical fusion. Tension increased as the dancers repeated a simple hop, step and jump phrase in rectangular pathways crossing and intersecting each other's focus. This was possibly the most powerful section of the dance: there was room to play with the energy and complexity of the phrases, drawing the piece towards a crescendo.


Scope Dance Theatre's Nefeli Tsiouti both choreographed and performed with three dancers in Palette. Courageously attempting to marry a visual artist and dancers onstage in a mixture of narrative and metaphor resulted in a somewhat disjointed piece. Several moments of potential, such as the relationship between breakdancing and graffiti, which is historically significant in the development of breakdancing, are strong bases from which to explore choreography. The notion of the artist both painting the dancer and creating the dancer explored in a scene of faux puppetry showed humour and personality, but confused the purpose of the dislocated artist left at his easel. Flourishes of spins, windmills and jumps were glimpsed but then overshadowed by the attempt to bring so many disjointed themes together. Taking breakdancing out of the context of the battle stripped it of its expected function, but the multiple themes of Palette which replaced this lacked in depth and focus.


Sven K Dance closed the evening in a highly polished formal piece, Heart of Matter. Travis Clausen-Knight's grouping and floor patterns with five female dancers and himself conveyed powerful but transient relationships between them, inspired by the power of the Higgs Boson, the 'God Particle'. Constantly changing duets, in which the pairs seem to become magnetised by each other's presence potentially added a layer of power and gender play to a more abstracted work. The angular and linear style was abundant with staccato vocabulary, powerful statuesque positions and flurries of fluid gestures. The addition of a blue glow-ball had the potential to undermine the piece but, in a scene of dreamlike quality created by cool blue lighting and use of silhouette, it took on some gravitas. This glowing sphere of energy was revealed as a determining force in the interaction between the dancers whose groupings eventually dispersed into a circle encompassing Travis Clausen-Knight and the light. Experimenting with object play underpinned the final section choreographically, elevating it from a showy light display to an integral element of the piece.