White Riot

Our weekend's final cultural outing featured a smorgasbord of dance pieces. This took place at The Atelier just off Bond Street, which is a small dance studio that a couple of times a year puts on shows by dancers who use the facilities. Morne's friend Renato was dancing which is why we got hooked in. There were six separate sequences.

Waiting On Thin Ice
The first of three boy/girl duets, this is everything I thought modern dance would be jerky angular body-popping, aggressive and confrontational. I can't say I understood what it was that was being acted out, but I did get some narrative sense of a couple in turmoil, which was quite powerful.
Lively Night, Dying Dawn
A solo piece by an unhealthily skinny ballerina. Meant nothing to me, I could as easily have been watching somebody warming up, as watching a finished piece. The act of standing en pointe has always looked agonisingly painful, and seems to be part of the masochistic self-denial of the dancer.
Unwrapped
This totally baffled me. Three dancers, one in her fifties, pranced around with a 'magic' cane, while an oriental lady tinkled on percussion, or blew (quite prettily) on a harmonica. This was the longest piece, and seemed to go on for ever. At some point dance intersects with the Avant Garde, and becomes challenging and transgressive, but this was just wilfully obscure.
The Phoenix And The Turtledove
This was the second duet and featured Renato, in an adaptation of a Shakespeare poem. It seemed to me that this was the most classical piece, and this was confirmed by R later. He's a very entertaining chap, and told fascinating bitchy stories about dancing with Nureyev in the '80's.
Reflections
Another solo ballerina piece, though why she was draped in a piece of old net curtain I couldn't fathom. Supposed to be a 'dance essay on the many meanings of reflection', gawd!
Rain Check
The final piece was another duet, and pitched mid-way between the two other duets, less classical than the second, but more romantic than the first, it was probably the most accessible piece.

I can only repeat that I just don't have the vocabulary to interpret this stuff. If a dancer moves to the left and turns, and then raises a leg and an arm, what difference would there be if he moved to the right, and only lifted an arm. Just seems too random for me.