Dancing Geek

I managed to double up the awesome this Friday by travelling to Lincoln to see both my Dad, and Retina’s latest piece, Antipode.  Having been lucky enough to work with Filip (company director) on a couple of different occasions in Derby it was great to see him in the Q&A afterwards as well – bonus!

The piece consists of four male dancers and a double bass player.  Whilst the guys are doing their thing on stage, the musician is playing, recording and mixing loops of his music, percussion and other clever tricks real time – an absolute treat for the audience (and probably the dancers too).

The dancing itself was mostly gorgeous to watch, and pretty full on for the whole hour.  Cue sweat patterns – all part of being a male dancer though, at least we don’t have to pretend that we don’t sweat.  There were the odd times when the unison wasn’t together, I caught a couple of moments where someone stopped to wait for the others to catch up and so on, but my Dad never saw any of that so maybe I’m being too picky.

The lifts were great fun, and even managed to perplex me as to how it was done on a couple – wonderful and frustrating at the same time.  The duets in general were excellent fun to watch and you could see the smiles on the dancers’ faces.  They even admitted afterwards that part of that was having to egg each other to keep going as energy levels started to flag.

Having 4 guys dance together was brilliant for me, as I got to see the differences between them and how, whilst I might not have the facility of one or the strength of another, they each had different limitations and natural abilities that made them unique and I’m no different.  I will admit to being horribly jealous at times, they’re all a few years younger than me, thus managing to make me feel old at 28, but mostly I was inspired and determined to find/create more opportunities to dance.

There’s only a couple of more dates down South to catch this, but it’s worth it – and if you don’t manage to see this one then check out Retina anyway.  They’ve been producing consistently great quality dance for a while now, and being based in the East Midlands it’s a real treat for us to have this based in our region, rather than down in London.

Sat 7 November 2009 saw Saddlergate, Derby host a Music & Arts Festival across 3 of its buildings: The Old Bell Inn, The Big Blue cafe, and Boo! sustainable and fair trade shop.

The different venues provided a venue for bands and booze, art, music and coffee, or snacks and relaxing respectively.  Chaos found a home in the latter two locations.

We got to chat with some really nice people at Boo!, try some yummy tea and cakes, and generally relax on big cushions under hanging origami and drapes, whilst listening to some lyrical guitar followed by a violin and digeridoo duet (my personal favourite).  They also have a rather interesting little library of books you can read or borrow which I may well be venturing back to have a look at, if I can face being in Derby city centre.

Big Blue had some great art on the walls, including origami on canvas, painted canvases and cut-out art that made me think of very artistic theatre props.  It was upstairs in the cafe that Chaos actually got to do some dancing.

The space itself was “compact” with sofas round the edges, and the musicians in one corner, so there wasn’t a great deal of room for us – especially after everyone wanting to listen had crammed in.  So we ended up doing duets to allow us to actually move and stretch out our limbs at least a little bit.

The music (performed by Leela and the Spaceship – a possible Futurama reference?) was fantastic to dance to, it was a really enjoyable experience being so close to the audience and musicians, even if it did result in a few bums in faces and not so graceful attempts to avoid mass collision.  I was never sure whether the applause was for us or the musicians, but all in all we seemed well received by everyone in the room – certainly only nice things were said to us afterwards.

We did try again later to perform, but the music was evidently too catchy, or my little solo too enticing, that within a few minutes the floor was full of everyone dancing so we again had a little duet but mostly just enjoyed dancing with everyone to ‘Look Pancake?’.

Given we knew nothing about the space, the music, the audience, the duration or indeed anything really about what we were going to be doing, it was such fun to just turn up and move together in such an accepting environment.  It’s fair to say that not everything worked – the lack of space was a massive restriction, but hopefully our creativity was a match for it most of the time.  Certainly there were lessons I took away about adapting to different spaces.

I wish I had someone to link to about the event, but we were having such fun I didn’t think to find this out at the time.  Still, perhaps there will be more opportunities in the future – I would certainly welcome them!