6 hours ago
19
It was a great idea: a dance through the four seasons of life, with performers whose own ages range from spring to winter, set to a reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Neat. It’s amazing to see older dancers who can bring all the textures of their experience to the stage. But the thing with such a wide-ranging cast, who all specialise in different styles, is that the dance ends up being somewhere in the middle: everyone can do it but it doesn’t play to anyone’s strengths. The movement lands in a mildly street dance-influenced zone, locked into a basic 4/4 feel. It’s when you get a glimpse of a dancer’s signature – the brilliant Michael Naylor having a rave-up/meltdown in a club scene, for example – that you think, “Oh, this is what we were missing.”
Choreography is by the American Alexzandra Sarmiento, who works mainly in musicals and as a movement director in theatre, alongside director Tinuke Craig. The set-up is a trio of dancers for each season, always dressed in blue, pink and orange, who we come to realise represent the head, heart and gut of a person, although that’s not so clear at the start. The set does have boxes stamped with “HEAD”, “HEART” and “GUT”, but (to me, anyway) it wasn’t obvious because that didn’t seem connected with the dancing.
