Bondage and Laughter

It has been one of those really unsatisfying days of work, but you really don't want to hear me moan about how boring yet frightening the whole exam situation is, so I will spare the world, and it is a good deed I say.

Despite ostensibly being at work all day (okay, more like all afternoon and then early part of the night, me being incapable of the 9 to 5 routine), I have managed to see two pieces of theatre as supposedly well-deserved breaks, though I'm not convinced I did deserve them.

Deborah Colker (a Brazilian contemporary choreographer) with her new show at the Barbican was amazing and if not particularly uplifting, at least it was entertaining, gasp-inducing and really rather sexy. The show was called 'Knots' and is quite rightly called the first ever bondage ballet. Lots of very lithe muscular dancers tying each other up, counterbalancing each other at impossible angles while attached by rope, bodily picking up trussed up companions to fling around in the air like so much lustful meat. It was acrobatic and terribly exciting to watch. Near the end of the first half a rope-less duet for two women amongst a forest of rope strands hanging down onto stage was one of the most beautiful moments in the whole show, following which two men and two women threw themselves into various piled up heaps, entangling and disentangling limbs and torsos only to entangle again. Set to Ravel, it was sexy rather than vulgar. In the second half the ropes disappeared, to be replaced by a huge Perspex box in and out of which dancers climbed like so many intent sexy monkeys. Much pressing against the perspex and dancing crazily around inside it.

In all it was a show which took innovative ideas and pushed right to the end with them in terms of the physical and visual boundaries of what you could possibly do, and the dancers were uniformly amazingly athletic, bendy, beautiful and bang on with every step. My two friends came away gushing and it certainly was an awesome sight, but I did feel there was something slightly missing which I couldn't quite pin down for a while. When I came home I read the reviews and they crystallised it for me -- it was a certain lack of innovative choreography, real new ways to move and new shapes to create that don't involve having to tie someone up first. I suppose it depends on whether you are looking for good dance, or good entertainment. I haven't anything to say against the latter (or I'd be far too snobbish for my own comfort), but the show did fall rather into the latter category. I've always been something of a purist as far as dance goes, and props while terribly exciting do cause you to neglect the actual dancing. Then again, Deborah Colker's shows are all prop driven (giant hamster wheels, stages littered with vases) I gather, so it is simply what she does, and she does it very well indeed, and I'd recommend anybody else to go see it if it turns up in your city.

Last night I went to see Simon Callow in Noel Coward's Present Laughter at the Arts Theatre. I'd not watched/read any Coward before, so I thought I would remedy the situation and rather thought I'd enjoy it -- and I did, tremendously! The plot is inconsequential really, it was all about perfect diction, sly innuendo, silk dressing gowns, flamboyant overacting, dashing arrogance you can't help loving, a neverending stream of one liners, and quite everybody falling in love with the protagonist. Loved it. Would love to see more Coward. It is a kind of entertainment that I sometimes feel a little premature in enjoying (my friend and I were sure we'd single handedly brought down the average age in the audience by a significant number of years), but I think I might as well resign myself already. (I listen to Radio 2, after all: jazz and showtunes, if that ain't old people music I don't know what is.) I've just skipped the whole drunken partying age and gone straight on to sparkling sophistication and maturity, ha ha!