© Andy Bradshaw 'Footloose - The Musical' reviews more Ian Palmer reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

Plot and narrative are about as relevant to Footloose as they were to Balanchine for Footloose gazes inward and celebrates itself as a justification of its own art. Such scraps of plot that are pegged onto it seem but a second thought and its spirit is one of aesthetic decadence - “art for art’s sake” – that finds its melting pot in the luxuriant and sexual decadence of its 1980’s setting. Dance, here, is not just about the freedom to move, but about the decadence of liberation – sexual, moral, psychological – and the casting off of oppression. It becomes a symbol upon which everything the 1980’s stood for – in music, politics, commerce, fashion (and here mention should be made of the stylish costume designs by Morgan Large, a designer who understands the need for freedom of movement and who I remember from my friend Ollie Gooch’s excellent Opera East production of Don Giovanni) – can be pinned and in Karen Bruce’s choreography it becomes a kind of battle-cry: the high octane, energy-driven lunges, the great leaps, the high kicks all have their ancestry (whether intentional or not) in those of Grigorovich’s Spartacus.

 

The city-boy hero, Ren, has a recurring motif of small pirouettes that he executes at moments of wistful yearning – a visual image of his desire to “break free”, whilst still being rooted at home. Later, in a scene where he is teaching his bumbling friend how to dance, the corps extends this motif, beginning to pirouette, but then at quarter turn leaping into grand jete. It is a turning point (literally) in the show – the moment of ideological break, where the dance becomes freedom, the symbolic means of escape. But Bruce’s choreography is not always sufficiently strong enough to carry the metaphorical weight. Much of it emphasizes the groin and crotch area, in which I suppose we are expected to see some kind of sexual debauchery. Yet the slinky hips and pelvic gyrations lack the smoldering intensity, the downright dirt that we might expect them to have, and their conventionality – their cliché – seems rather prim (how much more dirty is Njinsky’s faun!). The dance never truly speaks of the depravity it is touted to be, nor of the ideal that it becomes. Foot tappingly enjoyable, it carries us along in a haze of goodwill and is cheered to the rafters, but for me it left niggling doubts: footloose, yes, but never fancy free.