Critic Cal

The top three things I look for in a theatre trip: close harmonies, tight choreography, and smashed patriarchy. If I can have all that in an hour and a half or less, so much the better. So ' Two Man Show ' by RashDash Theatre Company – a fun and poignant 75 minutes'-worth of dance- and music-driven critique of androcentrism and the inadequacy of (androcentric) language to critique it – was my ideal evening out. It also sparked a number of bloggable trains of thought... The performance opened with a brief and rapid take on the history of patriarchy. In the paleolithic period (we were told) men and women were nomadic hunter-gatherers, equal in occupation and status . If anything, the female was revered (there is evidence of goddess worship) as the apparent source of life – the suggestion being that the link between sex and childbearing was not well understood. But this all started to change in the neolithic period, when human beings  discovered agriculture  and began sett...

I danced, the other day ... on the roof of a multi-storey carpark, in the rain, at bedtime. With relative abandon. It feels like a world away and an epoch ago but it really happened. I didn't go there to dance. I went there to watch –  Of Riders and Running Horses , part of Bristol's marvellous  Mayfest . Ooh, it were good. All exuberance and intensity and graceful, skillful, womanly  inelegance  for want of a better description. All set to all this live, pounding, alt-J-esque electronic indie music. I don't know what they meant  for it to be about but what I saw was a profound reclamation of the human body ... from shame, objectification and violence ... for personhood and personal connection. Normally, I would consider a finale which evolved into an invite to the audience as the perfect opportunity for an unhindered escape. "Aha!" some flat, lifeless part of me indeed piped up – "I can get me a clear run on the narrow stairwell before it jams with c...

There's stuff that you can say in dance that you just can't say with words. 'Course, when I say "you" I mean "humankind as a whole"; I can't speak for you personally, and for myself, there's nothing much that  I can say in dance, full stop. My attempts on that front are best compared with those of a unilingual Brit in a foreign country -- "no hablo español". Although, just as the accent and pronunciation of said Brit act as case-in-point, so a terpsichoreal rendering would doubtless lend my own confession the more conviction. "Je ne ne peux pas parler danser" indeed. Anyways, I digress. Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake , as well as being a beautifully impressive feat of skill and art, was also engagingly emotionally expressive. The story (much as it seems a shame to, after all, translate it into words) is of a young prince floundering under the weight of expectation and obligation accompanying his privileged birthright. He...

As soon as my extremely-slowly-but-finally-surely recovering tendon permits, I plan to dance. Not publicly, nor proficiently -- just enthusiastically around the house when no-one's watching. It is an undertaking from which I expect to derive great delight (ineptitude notwithstanding [1]), and I lament that I did not avail myself of the opportunity more frequently prior to being robbed of it by injury. For now, I must be content to sate my terpsichorean cravings vicariously. And the weekend just gone was the perfect occasion -- ZooNation 's Some Like It Hip-Hop   at the Peacock Theatre in London. OK, so the soundtrack was hardly Jay-Z, and the four of us comprised almost the entirety of the "nearly-30-to-my-mother-in-law-would-probably-rather-I-didn't-say" contingent amidst a slew of excitable 12 year olds, but it was super-fun: I just love watching people being really really good at what they do, especially when 'what they do' is lots of imaginatively ch...