Dancing Theatrics,
July 2010
Just been to see Streedance the movie in 3D- I expected it to be a load of old tosh, since colleagues had rubbished it for inane dialogue, unbelievable coincidences and silly set-ups. I thought I’d probably last half an hour if that.
I loved it from beginning to end.
What’s not to like?
Charming performers, particularly the slightly awkward, toothy, truthful Nichola Burley (‘I learnt to streetdance in six weeks. It was easy.’) playing the heroine who saves the crew; the dance routines, the romantic sub-plot and the sometimes quite lovely mix of ballet and streetdance. There were some real clunkers, true; ‘Welcome to my world’, ballet boy says when he shows the heroine around his humble home- ‘You can’t afford much on a student income..’ -yet London looks fab, throughout. Still, there’s something essentially moving about the storyline; a bunch of ordinary kids who can dance may- just may- have a chance of winning the UK Streetdance championships, when at the last minute, their leader quits for some ‘time out.’
Of course seasoned streetdancers find the film bland and formulaic, and the dancing too slick and packaged, but there’s something pleasingly simple here. I spent a large part of the film trying not to cry. (Oh, that was just me, then…)
There’s something here that gets to the heart of what Tightrope is/should be about. A community who can’t and won’t express themselves for fear of reprisals/shame/looking stupid. People who daren’t step outside their own un/safe world because ‘it won’t work.’ When Charlotte Rampling challenges Carly to make a ballet/streedance mix work, Carly says; ‘We’re from different worlds. It don’t work.’ She just wants cheap rehearsal space; Rampling wants her ballet dancers to have some heart and soul and she believes they can get that from Carly’s crew, with their lack of formal training and their joie de vivre. Rampling’s retort, ‘How do you know until you’ve tried?’ is the classic riposte to a disaffected teen, and it works. In the final scene, when the renegade crew take the stage with their ballet/streetdance fusion, the (teenage) crowd catcall; ‘This ain’t streetdance.’ But what they’ve created is what they vowed they’d do; ballet meets streetdance, and somewhere in between in is something beautiful and true. I don’t care if it’s naff. I don’t care if it doesn’t represent the truth of being a young adult in an inner city environment (it doesn’t, and it doesn’t even pretend to); it got me. Not sure how much the 3Dness added- although there are moments when you think a particularly energetic dancer is heading right at you and about to kick you in the face. That’s kinda fun.
I didn’t think this would have any connection with Tightrope, but went to see Gomito’s production of The Lamplighter’s Lament. Puppets, LEDs, big sheets of plastic. (This is doing a beautiful show a disservice). A man obsessively lights lamps; his little daughter drowns at sea. He repeats his solitary routine every night until he realises he must send her light back to her, wherever she is. The daughter is a puppet, and so beautifully created I almost prayed an actress wouldn’t turn up. She didn’t. But it made me think that puppets are so amazingly emotional, could a puppet be Cindi, climbing high, falling low? The simplest things become magical, and very few words were involved- I may be doing myself out of a job here, but I guess we need to think about less, less, less wordiness and more storytelling through action.
I loved Epiphany, at the HatFactory in Luton. Promenade meant that we were led by the magnetic storyteller, Dan Marcus Clark. Also a rather compelling musician Dan led us into and gently around the space that 3 leading hip hop artists create. While hip hop/street arts and theatre don’t always mix without awkwardness, here they do- with the added twist that the performers are telling their own loaded stories to an audience, and risking the judgment we all bring to performance. It also made me think a lot about how we involve an audience in a participatory way- here, we were asked not to influence the outcome or change the story/journey, but to take part in it as it evolved. We clapped, we danced (sort of), we were treated as characters on the fringe of the stories, and one bemused audience member was asked to hand out flyers for a fictional dance class. Bless.
Seeing the THEATRE IS and Throwdown UK production of Epiphany also made me think about words; there are probably slightly too many in the show for my taste (again, talking myself out of what I do for a living) but when they form strong, repeated motifs, they work wonderfully well. So; simple, frequent, and building. A rhythym, then, less than poetry, and not as musical as lyric.
This may seem tenuous, but in the light of this coalition government continually asking ‘The People’ what financial cuts they’d like to make, and now what laws we should lose/change, it again made me think about the community in Tightrope who don’t feel they have any ability to influence what happens around them, or to change their lives. As various Tories keep repeating, with rights come responsibilities, and young people are aware of their rights as never before. So what price do they/should they pay for those rights? This is one of the fundamental questions at the heart of Tightrope.
