Now in its 19th year, nottdance is a feather in Nottingham’s cultural cap, and 2007 marks the first time that this international festival of experimental dance and performance is being held in the autumn rather than spring. The programming, though, is true to form.

Consider Goat Island, a Chicago-based collective that has visited nottdance on numerous occasions. Although movement always features in its work, what this avant-garde troupe does might as easily be designated theatre as dance. But The Lastmaker holds greater significance in that it is the ninth and final production that the members of Goat Island will make. Founded in 1987, the company will gracefully fold next year once this show has had its day. There’s ample time for them to mourn, given that its UK tour encompasses nine cities and continues until June 6, 2008.

The Lastmaker takes its initial cue from architectural space. The audience sits either side of a bare rectangular playing area. The first third of the 90-minute performance is a kind of sacred ritual dance for the five-strong cast, all identically clad in casual clothes. They look and move like real people, not dancers. Selflessly adept and accompanied by a steady sonic pulse, they execute a repeating series of measured gestures and jumps whose complexity is based on the dimensions of an historical church-cum-mosque-cum-museum in Sofia.

The show is laced with spoken text, almost always with the idea of lastness attached to it. It includes Lenny Bruce’s penultimate stand-up routine, an a cappella rendition of Bach’s last minute of music and a camp Saint Francis of Assisi bidding the performance itself farewell in the tones of a ponderous prayer leader.

The Lastmaker is full of balanced contradictions as it follows a deliberately fractured internal logic. Cryptic yet transparent, it is mathematical in construction and poetic in content. If the poignancy of loss seems a bit drawn out by the end, Lin Hixson directs with a sure and sensitive hand.

Tour details: www.goatislandperformance.org

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