Star Rating: ***
Lofty, pillared rooms. Elegantly sweeping staircases. And below stairs? Long, narrow corridors with serviceably tiled walls and firmly shut doors. The Freemasons Hall in Edinburgh's George Street is full of intriguing locations for a site-specific piece that has a yen to be spookily mysterious or camply grandiose.
Alan Greig's new piece for the X Factor Dance Company, Other Voices, Other Rooms, has ambitions to be both. Cue our guide-cum-narrator Grant Smeaton, bare-chested in a voluminous, ruched all-white creation that billows, flounces and trails like a long swoosh of Hollywood ectoplasm. His role is to chivvy us from salon to nook, before setting the scene with various texts - Alan Bennett and Tennessee Williams are among the sources. Composer/musician Tom Murray adds to the build-up of atmospheres, sometimes as a lone figure playing on a mouth-organ, sometimes as the unseen hand behind an orchestrated soundscape.
But even as you're checking to see where the music is coming from, the X Factor dancers are busy slipping in and out of view, as if the rooms are giving up their secrets. It's an engaging concept with some thoroughly striking images that make full use of the venue's interior: us peering over the top-floor banisters at figures darting and dancing across the bottom of the stairwell is one, Greig's own sharp solo framed by an open door is another.
Typically, as choreographer and director, he includes tongue-in-cheek humour, too. But as we promenade, it seems as if we move almost as much (if nowhere near as adeptly) as the five dancers, who constantly enter spaces and then exit, leaving us longing to see more of them as opposed to the building.
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