25
DANCE/THEATRE LONDON'S SEASON BEST. Cont'd.
Photo:
Javier de Frutos. Photo credits: Chris Nash
Greeted
by wolf whistles from the school coach parties, action begins on a stark
stairway with a gay duo, Fabrice Serafino and Thomasin Gulgec, entwined. The
couple hot up with sexy thrusts, lots of groin, and a hand plunged between the
legs to rest, rather like a fig leaf, on the rear. It's danced sharply and
ironically to Porter's So in Love, and there's some comic relief as the seducer
calls his lover upstairs with a less than romantic nod of the head. One assumes
De Frutos has his tongue firmly in his cheek with this rather strange
kaleidoscope of couplings. The Porter music it is set to includes the rare
Within the Quota, created in 1923 for the Ballet Suedois, and believed to be the
world's first jazz ballet score. Here it's augmented by old favourites like
Ridin' High, wonderfully sung from the stairs by Melanie Marshall. De Frutos
cleverly plays with the ambiguity of the Porter lyrics with their homosexual
undertones; there's more sexual groping to Ridin' High with Maika Ramos giving
Paul Liburd's wonderfully defined posterior a good pummeling.
Artistic director Mark Baldwin has got fresh new dancers and they were buzzing, especially in 21, a brilliant fusion of projection and dance, from company member Rafael Bonachela. Having worked on Kylie Minogue's Fever tour, he has come up with a nifty collaboration with the pop diva and the result is a visual knockout. Giant images of Kylie, thankfully not shoehorned into those shorts, drift across the screen while dancers perform carefully crafted permutations of purest dance. The trouble is that you tend to focus on Kylie and miss some of the dance - but the overall effect is stupendous.
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