The Place

There was something to be glad about in all three of this evening’s offerings, despite some missed opportunities and ideas left to founder amid the distracting strain of efforts on the part of the companies to deliver some fragment of narrative at the expense of disciplining their talents as dancers.

For example: Giorgio de Carolis and Elena Zaino’s Bunga Bunga gets an automatic two points out of ten for an early sequence in which Ms Zaino applied strips of prosciutto to her face, whilst Mr de Carolis wanked and shot at the audience with an inflatable phallus. Now that’s really all the story you need, isn’t it? Time to start dancing! And both were clearly capable movers, but a technical glitch completely stalled the pair, despite several audience members gamely entreating them to ‘just keep dancing!’  Advice they sadly didn’t heed.

Matthew Huy’s After Happily Ever After was also a duet, this time wracked with angst-ridden flops and sighs, which seemed to be inspired by marital arguments brought on by Mr Huy’s propensity for stealing the covers in bed and glaring ominously at his spouse.  The romance was heartfelt, however, and Mr Huy and partner Emma Louise Walker were pleasantly exhilarated by their own rushing leaps and Time-of-My-Life lifts even if the choreography felt a bit trite and dated, at times awkwardly executed.

The most uplifting overall was Non Applicable Dance Collective’s feel-good romp Bi-Winning.  What the piece lacked in cohesion and thematic consistency – the self-help voiceover text at the start was cloyingly ironic and a rough-and-tumble play section felt out of place and too long – it made up for in smiles, brought on by the fun that was clearly being had by these four sweetly geeky women.  Po-faced, grinning, long-hair flying; Sian Myers, Fenella Ryan, Beth Mcguines and Orley Quick threw themselves bodily into juicy phrases, variously out-of-step and intricate, sloppily plucky and full of unashamed joy.

Jeffrey Gordon Baker

There are really such things as happy accidents. A technical hitch involving a musical breakdown during Bunga Bunga, an oddly titled portrait of a fractured romance by Giorgio de Carolis & Elena Zaino brought us closer to this engaging pair of performers than any of their artfully constructed scenes. Forced to improvise and open up, suddenly their dance came alive.

Up to that point we’d had a neat if clichéd picture of repressed desire, him leering at naked male pin-ups on one side of the stage, she chomping on a salami sandwich on the other. He also got to play with a giant blow-up phallus, always good for a cheap snigger. But the musical @#!*% -up turned it from empty symbolism to real human territory. Was the breakdown for real or was it part of the show? Either way, they should keep it in.

Non Applicable Dance Collective’s Bi-Winning started brightly, the four performers miming gestures to the verbal beat of a motivational speaker. But as this satirical take on how we try make ourselves into what we want to be gathered physical speed, it ran out of ideas. Ironic use of pop songs can fall horribly flat if the irony isn’t underpinned, and here hauling out Walk Like A Man by The Four Seasons felt more like a cheap attempt at crowd-pleasing than any comment at what had gone before.

There was some nice sub-classical phrasing in Matthew Huy’s After Happily Ever After and he and Emma Louise Walker made a well-matched duo, capable of lyrical interplay and appealing chemistry. But this was a piece that was less than the sum of its parts, where nothing truly hung together. From the disparate music choices to dance that shifted gear without an emotional core, this was pretty dancing but little more.

Keith Watson