Dance, dance, dance

I went to a dance show. No, don’t laugh. And don’t email me to tell me the blog has been hacked. I Ross of Balham, attended Ballet Revolucion at the Peacock Theatre.

Why you ask? In part exactly because it was something I’d not seen anything like before, and it is nice to do something different. Secondly what was promised looked like a show with lots of shorter pieces in it (so that, I reasoned, even if one bit wasn't to my taste, there would be another one along in a minute). And thirdly because it had a live Cuban band on stage, and I thought that would be worth listening to, even if I kept my eyes shut.

This review has its challenges. When I'm writing about a music gig I can talk about the band with an element of knowledge of what they are doing – and I generally know many of the songs too. Here I know what I saw and how it looked, but I lack the vocabulary to describe it to those dance connoisseurs amongst you. Also, as a dance show virgin I am bound to make some comments that are really trite or banal. To which I would say – if you are a dancer or a lover of dance - I know you could do better, but why don’t you go and write a review of a sheep dog trial and see how easy that is?*

Ballet Revolucion as a premise takes modern (pop and Latin) music and puts a range of dance routines to it. A small amount of the stuff was (in my eyes) pretty much exclusively ballet, and some pretty much street, but the vast majority was some kind of ‘fusion’ drawing elements from all sorts of styles. 

It is a young company and quite big. Unfortunately dancers don’t stay still long enough for me to count them (you can pull this reference into your review of sheep dog trials if you want) but there were I think 18 performers, plus an excellent band. There were big ensemble numbers and much smaller three or four person things, so that there was always something different happening.

I won’t comment on the technical stuff for the reasons given above, but anyone can see the astonishing grace, power and, above all, control that these dancers can achieve. You see dance on the TV and it just doesn't prepare you for quite how athletic it all is. That the human body is not only capable of leaping that high, and landing it, and of catching someone just right (when three couples do it at once and they are all the same even I can tell it’s perfectly executed), but can do that as part of a long show – not just as a one-off, it is truly great to watch.

I am sceptical about the whole 10,000 hours** thing but nobody gets that good at something without a huge amount of practice. And how you manage to keep your body together night after night punishing itself in that way also defies belief. (We did speculate about how many understudies this sort of company might have – you would think that on a long tour everyone must be a walking wreck at some point.)

Much of the music used was American pop from the last couple of years – Rihanna, Beyonce, Bruno Marrs etc. Pretty much the soundtrack of the Florida radio station the kids insisted on playing at full volume when we went there last year – which made me smile. (Digression: ‘Clarity’ was another of the endlessly played tracks then – and Foxes was the singer on Doctor Who last week. If you were interested…) And then some what I think of as traditional tango music and a lot of Cuban / Latin stuff. I did think they could have found better encore music than Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” but that’s a minor criticism all in all.

The band – usual rhythm and bass, drums, percussion, and two keys (one of whom also played those fabulous Latin trumpet lines), male and female vocalists. They worked hard and came across as highly musically accomplished. But they also seemed to be really enjoying it. I just mention this because if you are touring a show and doing nine performances a week more six months, enthusiasm should wear thin at some stage (thinking ‘Homeward Bound’ here). Not for these guys.

The show is on for about another week. It wasn't much more than half full when I went- which was a Friday night. And I only paid half the sticker price for the tickets thanks to Lastminute.com. I doubt any show is going to succeed on numbers like that. Quite disappointing that such an interesting work just isn't pulling in the punters.

Did I enjoy it? Definitely. You don’t have to know anything about dance to love a show like this. It might be that if you are a real dance purist it might annoy you because it is too ‘crossover’ – feels more of a ‘general public’ thing.

Will I go and see another dance show? Well, I don’t think I’m going to be a regular attendee. But I’ve decided I would like to go once to see a ballet, to see things in a very different context. I shall start saving now.

* assumption here that the set of ballet dancers and the set of shepherds have no intersection – but I feel pretty comfortable with this.

** see Malcolm Gladwell’s 'Outliers' book