Saturday, July 31, 2004 :
Snagged and Clored
Went to see three works of contemporary dance yesterday as part of “Snagged and Clored” at the Clore in the Royal Opera House. The first work, by Carol Brown, was the most enjoyable, in a fairly standard, uncontroversial, contemporary dance way. Good technical proficiency and interesting differences in physique and style of movement among the performers, if not especically groundbreaking choreographically.
The second work, by Sarah Warsop, featured a live DJ to create the soundscape. A clever idea, maybe, but generally this was pretty mundane — the most striking thing was that one of the dancers had much bigger boobs than the others… the work itself just didn’t do much for me.
The third piece, the “World Premiere” of a work by Bock and Vincenzi, was painful. I did not enjoy this one at all. Of course, I probably was not supposed to, but rather have feelings of pain, anguish, irritation and tedium evoked in me. In which case, it worked perfectly. But frankly, after a hard day in the office, I want to be entertained, especially if it’s already half nine and I haven’t had any dinner. OK, it’s art not entertainment. Unfortunately, I’ve never been much of a fan of art at the best of times. The piece had many of the hallmarks of annoying arty, poncy dance — irritating discordant bashing on a piano, repetitive contemporary dance twitching and falling over, bloke who sat there and did nothing for the whole thing, Germanic–sounding bird intoning a load of nonsense throughout. If I was better educated, I’d probably have thought it was fantastic, but on Friday I’m afraid that it was a case of wrong night, wrong time, wrong fuckin’ part of town.
Labels: contemporary dance
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