Let's Dance

Dancing. I do it, or at least I used to (mostly after application of alcohol), but I don't watch it. Not often. So it was kind of strange to find myself sitting in the dark red interior of Edinburgh's Playhouse having brow-beaten J, M, L & JH into forking out £20 to attend Michael Clarke's new show Come, Been and Gone. I hoped they weren't going to be grossly disappointed. At the time I booked I knew nothing about him. I didn't care. All I needed to know was that his new show was to have a soundtrack provided by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and my patron saint David Bowie, so nothing was going to keep me away.

These tracks are not just part of my history, they are woven into my bones. You'd think in such circumstances disappointment would be almost inevitable. Surely it was impossible for a dance, even if made by the Golden Boy (and Golden Arm, apparently) of modern dance, to avoid clashing all those weighty preconceptions that I already had about what these songs meant, and what they should feel like?

The fact that I know nothing about dance probably helped, but throughout the night I didn't have a single "that's not right!" moment. From the silver-clad lycra visions of the early track to the red legs and slash-backed black and white blazers against an azure background of Jean Jeanie (photo above courtesy of The Guardian), I was mesmerised. Moved to tears more than once, as well. Whether that was because of the dance or my own resonances with the music, I don't know, but it doesn't really matter: if the dance hadn't been so right the connection would not have occurred.

All those lycra-clad bodies did make me wonder though, as I looked around the packed house, whether part of the appeal of dance was that it was the only forum in which one can legitimately perv the human body. The show we trotted off to the next morning would suggest the answer is yes. Daniel K's Q & A played around with notions of art and democracy and consumerism by taking a survey-based approach to dance production, with all the research documented in a very weighty tome distributed to us all, courtesy of funding from the Singapore Arts Council. According to Daniel's survey, 'appreciating the human body' was the most popularly nominated response the audience made when asked what the objective of modern dance was, and the second most important after 'enriching our souls/spirits'.

We saw the same piece three times, once to open, once after having the research presented to us, and once after voting on our preferences for key elements such as music and costume, by the end of which we all knew a lot more about the decision making process of choreography than we did at the beginning. It also did a great job in raising key questions about art and the artist's relationship with their audience. Do they want to be loved? If so, is giving people what they want the way to acheive it? And where does truth and honesty, versus craft and artifice, come in to the whole equation?

I feel an essay coming on. So I will stop and go and get ready to go to Iceland. No, really.