Theatre 3 –
Acton – 17th October
Reviewed by
Bill Stephens
Once a year
QL2 Dance present three performances of a production designed to introduce their
youngest and less experienced dancers who participated in the annual “Chaos”
project. The dancers in this group range in age from 8 – 17. Included in the
group are some of the senior Quantum Leapers whose job it is to guide the
younger ones and those new to QL2.
The object
of the project is to introduce the dancers to the process of working with a
choreographer and to moving beyond just learning the steps. This includes thinking about concepts and
emotions, participating in improvisational movement and tasks, refining the
most effective ideas, then rehearsing them until everything flows.
This year,
four choreographers, including Ruth Osborne, the Artistic Director of QL2,
together with Jamie Winbank, Joshua Lowe and Alison Plevey, worked with 44 dancers
to create a program of seven short works with an overarching theme selected in
collaboration with the dancers. The
theme chosen this year was “consumerism” and the work, “All The Things”, was presented
in a seamless flow lasting just under a n hour.
For his
piece entitled “The Earth Can Provide”, Jamie
Winbank incorporated supermarket catalogues to
establish the idea of “want”’ versus “greed”. Alison Plevey continued this theme with her
work “Do This, Do that” with the dancers busily ticking off their lists of
tasks. A second more light-hearted work by Plevey entitled “Material Matters”
made imaginative use of multi-coloured shopping bags and included a cute dance
for the older girls to Madonna’s “Material Girl”.
Joshua Lowe
also contributed two works. His first, “Why You Gotta Move So Fast”, made
effective use of rap movement. His second, “INeed” was a cleverly executed journey, performed
with great enthusiasm by the boys. Firstly, as prehistoric man discovering the first red
apple, being persuaded by advertising that they should replace it with a green
apple, then progressing through time and products until they discover Apple
technology.
As is usual
with these programs QL2’s Artistic Director, Ruth Osborne, choreographed the
two works which bookended the program. The first “I Want, I Want, I Want”
introduced the theme and the dancers, while “Needs = food, love, air, shelter”
neatly summarised the theme before leading into a spectacular mass finale
involving all the dancers.
The whole
program was performed on an open stage utilising colourful props which could be
quickly carried on and offstage by the dancers, and simple, colourful costumes.
The music choices for each work were varied and well chosen. The dancers did not appear to be graded by
age, and several of the works featured younger dancers sharing the stage comfortably
with their more senior colleagues.
Particularly
impressive, considering the relatively short rehearsal period, was the polish and precision achieved in various sections as well as the enthusiasm and confidence with which the young dancers took
to the stage, managing to maintain clean lines and spacings while performing
often complex choreographic manoeuvres.
Impressive also was how cleverly the choreographers had worked to the
individual skill sets of the participants to achieve a dance program which was
entirely engrossing from beginning to end.
