Cabaret Under Canvas
English National Ballet, Greenwich Dance and the Royal Borough of Greenwich presented four days of Big Dance activity at the Greenwich Summer Festival for Big Dance 2012. Cabaret Under Canvas, the show that closed the run on Monday 9 July, was a thrilling mixture of genres and styles of dance under one roof. The evening, hosted by BalletBoyz Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, started with ballet…
English National Ballet’s dancers Jia Zhang and Max Westwell performed the beautiful White Swan pas de deux from Swan Lake. Zhang was a quiet and expressive Odette while Westwell was a supportive and attentive Siegfried.
Next, the circus company Hoop La La captivated the audience with a bold spectacle of great fun and skill. Dressed in old-fashioned bathing clothes, the three performers combined their astonishing command of hula-hooping with striking balances and contortions.
Contemporary dance was present in two different shows. A. D. Dance Company presented a demanding and very physical choreography for five dancers. Choreographer and dancer Holly Noble stood out as a confident and strong performer. Cathy Waller’s Company has recently created a new piece to an original composed score by Christopher Preece. The intense fragment showed in Greenwich matched percussive music with ground oriented choreography. Four female dancers performed it with attack and conviction.
At the heart of the bill, two very interesting pieces of dance theatre demonstrated the possibilities of the genre to dissect human behavior. The female duet by Levantes Dance Theatre was a funny and visually attractive set of reflections on the triviality of daily routines. The brevity of the work allowed only a glimpse of the rich content hidden under its deliberately frivolous surface. Luca Sivestrini’s Protein Dance presented an excerpt of its critically acclaimed show LOL (lots of love). In ironic contrast with its title, it deals with the difficulties in building harmonic relationships. The dancing and acting couple shone in a piece that impacted for its ability of conveying truth and immediacy.
The evening brilliantly ended with Da Bratz, the youth group of the hip-hop dance company Boy Blue Entertainment. The work on stage was a cohesive piece for an ensemble of seventeen skillful dancers. They performed with authority and energy, each one retaining their own personality.
Cristina de Lucas
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Tags: ballet, ballet dance, Big Dance, cultural olympiad, Dance GB, london, London 2012 Festival, olympics, performance
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