© Joris-Jan Bos 'Sh-Boom' reviews 'Shutters Shut' reviews 'Silent Screen' reviews 'Signing off' reviews recent Nederlands Dans reviews more bruce Marriott reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

One piece on the bill was like my fun thumbnail memories, Sh-Boom, in which dancers act out and overemphasise the lyrics of old crooning numbers from the heyday of radio in a loving battle of the sexes. Inherently funny, its the surprises that lift it further, like the nude man doing a fan dance with a saucepan and one reluctant singer needing to be pushed on stage with a special prodding device. Short and sweet, it ends with confetti raining down on us which turns out to be little slips of paper with 'Life could be a Dream' printed on. Magical and inclusive, we need more.
 

Even shorter was Shutters Shut to the fragmented Gertrude Stein poem about Picasso read by the lady herself. At 4 mins it's one of the most precise duets I've ever seen where speed of movement is all. But the poem has little relevance for me and the dance ditto, if a technical diversion of some clever cleverness.

The evening got off to an inauspicious start with Silent Screen - sadly the most recent piece on the bill (from 2005) and also the longest. There was a lot of overt cleverness on display but to no meaningful end. Even the generally excellent programme notes by Mary Brennan don't really help unlock a piece about personal memories and the past - possibly. There was no coherence here beyond the need to parade endless theatrical tricks and have great dancers contort their bodies pleasantly or otherwise. But some of the tricks were less than impressive in a world full of cgi cleverness on everyday TV - like the 3 screen, stage wide, enveloping back projection not joining up seamlessly and the odd crude-looking animation. However I did like the worlds largest party dress walking up from the pit to cover the entire stage. The wonderful, and danceable, Philip Glass music was let down, and yet the audience whooped mightily at the end.
 

The evening closed with another work heavy on theatre and impenetrable meaning - Signing off. Billowing drapes and another monumental Philip glass score drove this on usefully faster and while some wonderful sculptural shapes emerge in both cloth and the dance I still felt I hadn't a clue what was really going on in a piece created at a time when the choreographers were leaving the womb of NDT with some very mixed emotions, I'm sure.

Lightfoot and Leon can make me laugh but when they get serious the heavy theatrical props get in the way and I'm lost in a general fog of extraneous 'stuff'. It would be nice to see them strip right back and just communicate using bodies on a stage.