Company Chordelia's Revel: Broken Barbies and Swan Lake at the Byre

Company Chordelia's new show Revel opened at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, pairing broken Barbie dolls with a splash of Swan Lake in a staged meditation on the ageing dancer's body.

The production is conceived and staged by artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones, who performs alongside co-creator Steinvör Palsson, a teacher and choreographer well known in the Scottish dance community. Together they build a piece that begins with warm-up routines and slides into a reverie about life on the stage.

At its core, Revel addresses the aches and sprains that come to carry heightened significance for a seasoned dancer turning up to work each day. The show frames these physical changes as more than inconvenience: they become the material of performance itself.

Lloyd-Jones's work is, by its own logic, a riposte to the fear that you might "make a spectacle of yourself" if you don't stop at the "right" moment. Rather than retiring quietly, the performers put the spectacle on stage deliberately — broken dolls, borrowed ballet and all.

The Guardian's review, published from the Byre on 19 September, describes Revel as a "whimsical rumination" on bodily change and praises it as a "funny, carefully calibrated show". The calibration matters: the piece balances humour against its sharper subject, the cultural pressure on older performers to know when to leave.

That a choreographer of Palsson's standing in Scottish dance appears as a co-creator signals that Revel is not a curiosity but a statement from inside the profession. Lloyd-Jones, leading Company Chordelia as artistic director, stages the argument that the ageing body on stage is not a problem to be managed but a subject worth examining in public.

The imagery tells the story in shorthand. Broken Barbies suggest bodies pushed past their intended shape; the Swan Lake references invoke a classical repertoire whose conventions of youth and line the show quietly interrogates. The warm-up routines that open the evening ground the fantasy in the daily labour of the studio.

For audiences in St Andrews, Revel offers a rare sight: a dance work that treats the question of when to stop as an artistic question rather than a career-administration one. The production's run at the Byre Theatre — a venue with its own history of championing Scottish work — positions it squarely within the national conversation about who gets to keep performing, and for how long.

Revel continues Company Chordelia's record of staged provocations dressed in charm. Its wager is clear: the spectacle the ageing dancer fears becoming may be exactly the spectacle worth making.