THE fruits of a collaboration between QL2 Dance and The National Dance Company of Scotland, forged in Glasgow at the 2014 Commonwealth Youth Dance Festival, was on show at The Q on Sunday with the performance of a triple bill entitled “10,000 Miles”. Consisting of an individual work from each company, together with a collaborative work involving all the dancers from both companies, “10,000 Miles” provided a fascinating insight into the work of each organisation.

Presented in three acts, without an interval, the program commenced with “Act of Contact”, choreographed by Sara Black for QL2 Dance to an original score by Alisdair Macindoe.

Exploring touch and messages received through the skin, “Act of Contact” commenced dramatically with four red-costumed couples posed around the stage. Various responses elicited by one partner gently touching the other were extended as more dancers took the stage, with the reactions increasing in intensity until at one point the stage was filled with furiously vibrating bodies.

Artistic Director of YDance, Anna Kenrick was the choreographer for “Maelstrom”, created as a showcase for the company’s 2016 National and International tours and premiered in Glasgow in early March. Performed to music by David Paul Jones, with costumes by Jenni Loof and lighting design by Simon Gane, “Maelstrom” is a complex, light-hearted response to the media obsessed world of online communication. Sharply delineated squares and rectangles of light provided an ever-changing environment in which the dancers confidently performed the often quite acrobatic choreography which propelled the work.

The final piece, “Landing Patterns”, choreographed by Anna Kenrick and Ruth Osborne during the five-day workshop, involved all the dancers from both companies. Working to an original soundscape by Adam Ventoura, against video projections by WildBear Entertainment, “Landing Patterns” commenced with a striking tableau of bodies piled on top of each other centre stage. The dancers disentangled from the pile to fill the stage for a remarkably polished performance in which the two companies fused seamlessly in a succession of cleverly staged movement combinations.

Strikingly it was similarities, rather than the differences, that “Landing Patterns” revealed about the work of both companies, that left the strongest impression, confirmed later in the comments expressed by the young dancers in the short Q & A session which followed the performance.