| 21 August 2011
Inviting three guest dance companies to share the stage, Booking Dance Festival 2011 in ‘Split Bill’ aims to feed their audience’s appetite for America’s freshest dance talent. Sadly the reality of ‘Split Bill’ left me and many others in the theatre completely unsatisfied.
Sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb was the construction of the show itself. The venue was over-ambitious, the interlude between performances painfully slow, and the whole thing lasted above and beyond what it should have. With all these factors in my mind, I couldn’t help but feel for the various companies who had cut off their nose to spite their face. Had the production been slicker, the show a good half-hour shorter and the venue more intimate and atmospheric, this review would read very differently.
Rhythmic Circus, a tap troupe from Minneapolis, had great energy, with two of its four dancers, Nick Bowman and Ricci Milan, proving to be absolutely captivating. The problem was that there was too much padding between the routines and too many routines that were interchangeable. A condensed version of this one would have been brilliant.
The New York-based company DamageDance were next, with their world premiere Glimpses. Contemporary in nature, Glimpses focuses on different psychological disorders and the prevailing feeling of sufferers that these must be hidden from view. While the strength apparent in the dancers’ torsos was astonishing, the choreography this company delivered waned and wavered, leaving you frustrated at their lack of consistency.
Labyrinth Dance Theatre’s offering Noor sounded incredible: a biographical study of Noor Inayat Khan, a Sufi pacifist, poet and musician who became a spy for the allies during WWII. But again it failed to hit the spot. Snatches of Morse code, Winston Churchill’s speeches, Noor’s letters and Buddist fables formed this piece’s soundscape, while Felicia Norton danced alone to it. The solo piece presented by Norton was nuanced and subtle, so the fact that the soundscape, which should have been insightful and atmospheric, was so distracting and ham-fisted made this piece jar.
Disappointing, as one feels these companies had more talent than they were letting on.
Booking Dance Festival 2011: Split Bill, EICC, 20-21 August, 4.00pm
| Next > |
|---|
