Modern dance is always a bit of a challenge and never more so than when it's like jagged and jerky brownian motion performed to a backdrop of randomly flashing lights and a soundtrack that might be music or might not.

What's it all about?  What are they trying to tell us?  Is it meant to be the end of the world or what?  Such were the questions going through my mind at Wayne McGregor's Far at the Festival Theatre the other night.  I eagerly awaited enlightenment from the after show Q&A session led by one of the Grads' stars from 4:48.

But michty me and help ma boab, as my granny would have said, the dancers had no more idea than I had of what it was all about and some of them had been dancing since they were three years old so you'd have expected them to have a bit of interpretative skill would you not.

Well enlightenment turns out to be the name of the game when you read the blurb on the website.  I quote:
"Inspired by the controversial Age of Enlightenment, FAR mines an era that first placed ‘a body in question’. Ten incredible dancers confront the distortions, sensuality and feeling of the 18th Century’s searing contemporary sensibility....." and it was music: "....to a new, haunting score by the critically-acclaimed composer Ben Frost."

I was also hoping for enlightenment when the following day I went to see Last Year in Marienbad at the Cameo, the very cinema in which I saw it as the nouvelle vague swept over us in the early sixties.  The Village Voice, whose review I recommend, says "back in the day.....audiences had great fun pretending to be baffled...".  Let me say it out loud - I wasn't pretending.

Surely now with all the experience of life I've gained since, the then puzzling movie would be as an open book.  Perhaps not quite.  It is still definitely odd.  I now think (though I could be wrong) that there is no meaning.  It's just the filmaker, having somehow got the money together, having fun doing the oddest things he could think of with his actors and his camera.  And it looks absolutely gorgeous.

So the moral is probably that, just because something is seriously weird it doesn't mean it's serious.  I can't wait to revisit Hiroshima Mon Amour.