DANCE

Stray across the thick black lines that divide one art from the next and you risk unsettling your audience. Yolande Snaith's work has been criticised in the past for allowing text to play too great a part or for allowing props and designs to carry the central idea. Her most recent work Gorgeous Creatures - at the Spring Loaded dance festival in London next week - is typical. Notionally set at the court of Elizabeth I, the action really takes place in Snaithland, a looking-glass territory familiar to fans of this archly cerebral choreographer. Snaith herself plays the Virgin Queen, sporting a monster farthingale. "I play her as a cross between Queen Elizabeth and Alice in Wonderland. It's inspired by the life of Elizabeth I but it's not a historical representation. I was fascinated by her relationship with men particularly. She was a virgin supposedly but she had all these game-playing relationships. One of the things we picked up on is that people around Elizabeth were trying to play the game right, going wrong, and getting beheaded".

"Gorgeous Creatures is very humorous, very colourful, very theatrical. Although we use our voices, it's not heavily based on text, it's more about creating music with our voices. We're beginning to merge the voice world and the music world."

Yolande Snaith is aware that hopping from dance to text to pure spectacle and back can be disconcerting for audiences. "I've come up against this time and again. There are many layers: the poetic movement in dance vocabulary and the more cerebral spoken word. I really like the complexity of that combination".