BGroup: Just As We Are

‘Dance is your birthright’ concluded the pro in the brown flares as 15 audience volunteers John Travolta-d to a finish, watched by the rest of us through special-effect glasses that made everything look like TOTP II. Ben Wright is a wonderfully anti-elitist choreographer who drives no artificial wedge between the dance we watch on stage and the dance we actually dance in our own lives. But this reframing of his signature 2008 audience participation disco piece doesn’t quite satisfy – partly because the new, opening group work is a paranoid, jumpy affair concerned with the vulnerabilities that our bodies leave us open to; partly because the sensual piano-backed duet that follows throws up uncharacteristically few original moments. But mainly because the climactic piece, a celebration of dance as unfettered communal joy that felt so progressively playful back in 2008, has lost its magic to YouTube and the Harlem bloody Shake.

Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome, 20/3/13

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