Revel Review: Ageing Dancers Tackle Swan Lake and Barbies — SkimNews
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- Revel by Company Chordelia is a dance piece conceived and staged by artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones, performed with co-creator Steinvör Palsson — a well-known teacher and choreographer in the Scottish dance community — and framed as a personal riposte to the fear of "making a spectacle of yourself"
- Lloyd-Jones and Palsson emerge from under a discarded puffy dress and a storage crate, given nine hours to get ready, working through a checklist of reading glasses, multivitamins, alternate nostril breathing, and an HRT patch
- Their warm-ups diverge sharply — Palsson serenely works through qigong while Lloyd-Jones runs, lunges, and shakes — before both drift into dreamlike dance recollections ranging from Swan Lake to marching gestural sequences
- Palsson delivers what the reviewer calls a "juicy rendition" of "Whatever Lola Wants" while Lloyd-Jones runs to the bathroom; the pair later bring out Barbies to demonstrate former abilities before smashing the dolls to bits
- Despite exaggerated hunching meant to signal age, their dancing histories remain visible — Lloyd-Jones "bounds around the stage with clarity" and Palsson "hovers delicately on her toes" — before they don costumes for one final curtain call
Why it matters: For Scottish dance audiences and the wider performing arts community, "Revel" directly challenges the unspoken industry expectation that dancers step aside at a "right" moment — positioning aches, HRT patches, and accumulated technique as material worth performing rather than evidence of decline. The piece's comic register, anchored in the two performers' finely calibrated rapport, makes that argument accessible instead of polemical.
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