Revel review: Company Chordelia's witty dance on ageing bodies — SkimNews
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- Revel, conceived and staged by Company Chordelia artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones, is a "whimsical rumination" on the inevitable aches of an ageing dancer's body and a riposte to the fear of making a spectacle of oneself.
- Lloyd-Jones and co-creator Steinvör Palsson, a prominent Scottish dance teacher and choreographer, emerge from a discarded dress and storage crate in an empty dressing room and race against a nine-hour backstage countdown.
- Their divergent warm-ups anchor the piece — Palsson serenely wafts through qigong while Lloyd-Jones runs, lunges, and shakes, ticking off multivitamins, alternate nostril breathing, and an HRT patch before they can begin.
- Dreamlike dance recollections sweep from Swan Lake to marching gestural sequences, with Palsson delivering a "juicy" rendition of Whatever Lola Wants while Lloyd-Jones dashes to the bathroom.
- The pair bring out Barbies to demonstrate their former abilities — "I don't think you could ever do that, Kally" — before smashing the dolls to bits in one of the piece's most striking set pieces.
- The review praises their finely calibrated comic rapport and notes that "no amount of exaggerated hunching can hide the dancing histories in their bodies," with Lloyd-Jones bounding the stage with clarity and Palsson hovering delicately on her toes.
Why it matters: Lloyd-Jones frames Revel as a personal riposte to the pressure on older performers to retire at the "right" moment — and the review affirms the gambit, arguing that their trained bodies carry skills that no amount of theatrical stooping can disguise. For the Scottish dance community in particular, the pairing of a longtime choreographer-educator with a mid-career artistic director offers a rare on-stage defence of continuing to perform past the age dancers are expected to step aside.
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