Festival Dance TAP KIDS Tapping the light fantastic ●●●●●
Anyone who pitches up at Tap Kids with a cynical attitude and a sense of impending dread will quickly find themselves struggling to contain smiles of unfettered delight. While the show – a hybrid of Tap Dogs and High School Musical – is rooted firmly within the teen flick tradition, with all the familiar milieu (the canteen, classroom, gym, graduation) and stock characters (the geek, the new kid, the babe, the sports jock) the genre is revisited with such bravado by the eight- strong cast that it’s impossible not to be charmed. This is no dance school end-of- year display, the company instead tell a sweet story of teen love through a series of inventive set pieces, including a tap’n’basketball routine and a scene in which the girls clatter around on their lunch trays. The preciseness of the footwork and the individual performers’ virtuosity is at times almost hypnotic, and there’s a nice variety of pace and rhythm throughout.
With a genuine sense of camaraderie coming from the cast, the narrative is shot through with an endearing generosity of spirit and every routine is performed with an incredible, unflagging energy. (Allan Radcliffe) ■ New Town Theatre, 0844 477 1000, until 30 Aug, 5.45pm, £11–£12 (£9–£10).
MAN-MADE: 1, 2, 3 Masculinity in the spotlight ●●●●●
On The Verge, a Midlands-based theatre co-operative, are performing three shows over three weeks, all sharing the title Man-made, and looking at purpose and values in the modern world. Man-made: 2 stars dance company fromthegreyhouse and takes on the way that boys are created by society.
It’s spectacular physical theatre, featuring 40 minutes of rough- housing and macho display. All of the dancers are powerful, tough and the series of playground games and all- out punch-ups are executed with force and energy. The message, that men are defined by violence and peer pressure, is hammered home. Despite the lack of individuality between the characters, the argument that men are conformist and savage is made clearly and the message never detracts from the exciting leaps and tussles.
The action is kept up for the whole production, with duets giving way to group tumbling. Impressive physical feats, loud, pounding music and aggressive posturing lends the show a brutal, provocative edge. While there is space for a more measured consideration of how men are, Man- made: 2 is exhilarating and relentless, with a clear narrative and plenty of high-octane thrills. (Gareth Vile) ■ C Chambers Street, 0845 260 1234, until 30 Aug, 12.30pm, £7.50–£9.50 (£4.50–£8.50).
OUSIA Atmospheric illusion ●●●●●
list.co.uk/festival
RAW Aerial spectacular that never quite takes off ●●●●●
Sometimes, aerial dance doesn’t need a narrative. Some pieces, like 2007’s Fuerzabruta, present unconnected images, building a sense of wonder in the audience that grabbing for narrative meaning would puncture.
Although it’s on a smaller scale, there are plenty of gorgeously put- together set pieces in Irish company Fidget Feet’s aerial homage to clubland. From the red ropes, bouncers as ushers and the sli-i-ightly dated techno soundtrack, we’re in the Superstar DJ-era, pill-happy 1990s. The swooping aerial pieces on wires imbue every tiny, grubby aspect of a night out – coming up on drugs, a catfight – with the grandeur it presumably has in the protagonists’ heads.
From here, though, things fragment. There still seems to be some
narrative, but it’s incoherent at best, the momentum punctured by irritating comedy moments where the DJ character watches television. The moments that work best – an exhausted young couple clambering over ropes to find each other in an astonishingly beautiful athletic duet; a dream-like sequence with a hanging ballgown – are fleeting within an incoherent whole, and too much of the smaller-scale floor choreography feels like filler.
Go for the spectacle, but don’t bother reading anything deeper into it. (Kirstin Innes) ■ Dance Base @ Out of the Blue Drill Hall, 225 5525, until 27 Aug (not 24), 9pm (and 2pm 22 & 23 Aug), £12 (£10).
All those who dared to board Darren Johnston’s Ren-Sa bus back in 2005, will know what a master of disorientation he is. It was a journey into the unknown, with blacked-out windows making it impossible to know where you would end up, or what would happen to you. Ousia is a far more low-key, and
shorter, affair but Johnston’s love of atmosphere is still very much in evidence. Led from the foyer back out onto the street, we’re taken into a side building filled with dim corridors. Once again, the sense of anticipation is palpable: excitement at what’s to come, mixed with a modicum of fear as you feel your way through the darkness.
The show itself is engaging, although you can’t help but feel that Johnston could have done so much more with the set-up. Viewed through a dark gauze, a dancer moves beautifully in time with a mirror image projected onto the screen behind her. Strobe lighting clicks on and off repeatedly, dazzling the eyes, and eventually feeling like a filler where something more substantial belongs. (Kelly Apter) ■ Dance Base @ Out of the Blue Drill Hall, 225 5525, until 30 Aug (not 24), £6.
ZEITGEIST Breathtaking Butoh bento box ●●●●●
This is the first time Australian company Zen Zen Zo has come to the Fringe, but they’re no blushing debutants. Zeitgeist is a retrospective of their shorter works inspired by the untamed Japanese art form of Butoh. But it’s also a pulse check, a look at how they’ve responded to the mores and issues of the last decade. The first piece, ‘Unleashed’, shows that this ensemble has absorbed the philosophy of Butoh dance to its core. A dystopian stage-full of shivering, naked human animals evolve slowly,
engaging in primal mating rituals with the sort of bestial glee that suggests they might just turn on you at any second.
Although the six pieces that follow include everything from burlesque to performance art, that intrinsic wildness underpins everything, keeping the audience at once perpetually unsettled and thoroughly entertained. Shaken out of your comfort zone? All the better to think with, my dear. Zen Zen Zo will make you laugh and shriek and cringe, but they absolutely refuse to just let you sit passively (NB: don’t wear anything you don’t mind getting, er, messy. I quite literally left with egg on my face).
The most affecting work is simply called ‘Terror’. A dreamy depiction of religious ecstasy, it begins with sinewy, live Arabic song, shifting in the last couple of seconds into an utterly shocking indictment of recent Western foreign policy. To move successfully – and immediately – from such bleakness into a hilarious, kitschy parody of a certain kind of chocolate-fetishising, shrieking femininity, and have neither piece dampen the impact of the other, takes brilliance. (Kirstin Innes) ■ C Chambers Street, 0845 260 1234, until 31 Aug, 10.55pm, £9.50–£11.50 (£8.50–£10.50)
42 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 20–27 Aug 2009