What’s the collective noun for a group of dancers who decide to create a performance by rehearsing around busy work, parenting, pregnancy and degree course schedules? A ‘madness’ of dancers perhaps? More appropriate for this years ‘Raconteur’ piece would be a ‘delight’ of dancers.
This collaboration between highly experienced local dance teachers and recently qualified dance graduates is, by turns; joyful, captivating, amusing and poignant. Gently woven together by carefully crafted on-stage transitions, each ‘scene’ allows us to visit a dance ‘experience’ inspired by a written paragraph that Raconteur’s Artistic Director, Clare China collected from each dancer about their dancing lives.
Sensitively and skillfully choregraphed by each dancer, the piece cleverly encompasses gentle ballet; tap that riffs with the rise and fall of a trumpet; humerous, gestural physical theatre depicting marriage, pregnancy and motherhood; competition for the limelight with a nod to Fosse; the cruelty of ‘body fascism’ and self doubt; exhuberant fusions of contemporary, street, Afro Caribbean and release-based movement. All this is shared with truly gorgeous music, including Flash Mob Jazz and Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
The mutual support between the performers brings a warmth to the stage that naturally filters across to the audience..so how did they feel at the end of the first show?
..like dancing of course…after the standing ovation!
Cathy Richards
Fringe TheatreFest views 