Confessions On A Dance Floor

We got free tickets to the press night of this show from Renato, a dancer friend of Morne's. I feel I just don't have the dance vocabulary to be able to judge how good or bad the dancing was. When it comes to music or films, I know what the basic building blocks are, and I know when someone is re-arranging them in an interesting way. Here I felt I was having to make judgements in a void, which was very difficult. All I can say was that there were lots of moves, and that they were obviously difficult to learn, and required considerable athletic ability to execute. That said none of the dance sequences achieved any transcendent quality for me where the lack of context became irrelevant.

Checking up on Antonia Franceschi I found she appeared in 'Grease' and in 'Fame' before joining the New York Ballet School under George Balanchine. And she is 10 days older than me. She'd had a difficult childhood, with a criminally negligent mother, and it was this painful time that she had decided to dramatise. Written as an autobiography, or a stage play may have provided a greater distance from the events and more room for some objectivity on the horrors of her early years. Here with painful episodes described directly to the audience by the 'victim', it felt more like a group therapy session than a piece of art. It made me a little uncomfortable as I felt she emphasised the more sensational encounters, and at the end of the day had traded one abusive parent for another (Balanchine) and one set of deviant behaviours for the obsessive competitiveness and self-denial of the dance world. I didn't get any sense of dance providing redemption, but maybe she didn't want to say that.

There were echoes of 'The Fortress Of Solitude' in the setting of a child being brought up negligently in an alien neighbourhood and having to find ways of dealing with peer abuse through a secret life and a blank submission to humiliation.