The New Ballet Club Knowing Anna
Etta Ermini Dance Theatre Game Spotting
Goddard Nixon Project Ladies and getlemen, how bored are you?
New Ballet Club's Knowing Anna is not ballet but street dance - or rather, a musical-theatre version of it. The eleven dancers have the look of stage-school graduates and the choreography follows West End virtues: narrative clarity, emotional directness, disciplined but entertaining dance sequences. The story is about fame and its discontents: a circle of autograph-hunters tightens into a noose of adulation; the snappy rhythms of a trio of sharkish managers feel like the brutal buzz of publicity. Some effective mirroring scenes evoke a world of image-making and misidentification. This is a well-made though mostly undemanding piece, its aims neither too high nor too deep for its means.
Etta Ermini's Game Spotting features two wayward girls, a self-consciously sexy woman, a conventional-looking businessman and an aimless accordionist. It's a collage of workshop ideas - improvisation games, comedy pratfalls, a lot of talk, a lot of hurtling around. A stronger direction occasionally emerges: an anointing ritual that transforms these city-dwellers into tribal creatures, some offbeat irony as the performers talk about performing. Overall, though, it's scrappily strung together and scrappily executed. This may be a piece of experimental physical theatre, but a few West End virtues wouldn't go amiss.
Ladies and Gentleman, how bored are you? is an unlikely title for Jonathan Goddard and Gemma Nixon's duet - a subtle, layered portrait of a relationship. But my answer was unequivocal: not a bit. In the first scene, the pair slip through and around each other's limbs, their personal spaces meshing but not merging. In the second, they bed down, shuffling blearily off into their own introspective dreams. In the third, they are wilder, more driven, tumbling like animals, and in the final emotive section, they lean and sway, torsos as supple as if stirred by sighs. Goddard and Nixon bring a professional finesse to both piece and performance. In fifteen captivating minutes what you get is far more than what you see.
Sanjoy Roy
A single dancer is spotlighted, centre stage, in a sparkling silver sequined jacket. But the stage soon plays host to ten other performers in Lee Alexander and Company's Knowing Anna. With costumes and choreography reflecting street dance, sharp shapes are thrown in formation to funky house music. Sequined Anna is some kind of celebrity and at times she cowers, claustrophobic in a crowd of autograph hunters. This is a fresh and energetic piece, although it lacked clarity of vision in places.
An accordion player is another solitary figure in the spotlight, opening Game Spotting. Etta Ermini Dance Theatre comprises of two dancers and two actors, with the afore-mentioned musician never really participating in the frenetic action. Although both dialogue and choreography have an untamed energy, this was a missed opportunity to explore the physical containment and claustrophobia inherent in the experience of being stuck in a train on the London Underground.
The closing piece, a first time collaboration between Dancer of the Year Jonathan Goddard and Gemma Nixon, was in a class of its own. In Ladies and Gentlemen, How Bored are You?, a couple in the first stages of exploring an attraction are drawn together, yet shy of one another's touch. Blackouts divide the evolution of the relationship into stages. In one episode they seem to lie in bed together, and by repeating jerky phrases of movement, go through the motions of missionary position sex, always the same and stiffly devoid of passion. In another, the two push and pull at invisible forces to rhythmic percussion and discordant chords. By the last section, our couple glide in a slow motion duet, then joyfully spin, over and over, as the final fade to black brings the piece to an optimistic close. Technically stunning, these two move in a harmony with each other which is poetic and mesmerising - transporting the audience a world away from boredom.
Sam Gauntlett
The New Ballet Club, Knowing Anna, photo Mark Barnfield
Etta Ermini Dance Theatre, Game Spotting
Goddard | Nixon Project, Ladies and gentlemen, how bored are you?