Big Dance 3

The festival draws to a close, but the understated pieces that brought dance into our normal lives will live on


Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” quipped Elvis Costello (amongst others), adding “it’s a really stupid thing to want to do”.

Well, there was a lot of dancing about architecture in Big Dance 2008. People pogoed and swivelled around Nelson’s Column, shimmied through shopping centres and rolled around the Royal Academy of Arts courtyard. Were they really stupid things to do? Debatable, I grant you – but in my book, certainly no more so than writing about music, and very probably both more pleasurable and more unusual.

Shobana Jeyasingh’s 2Step arrayed dance students across the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Earthly beings rather than heavenly angels, they thrust across the stairs in ranks and phalanxes, their costumes staining the steps with deep reds and purples, like blood on the stone. Over at the Royal Academy of Arts, Katie Green and her students played with folding geometrical models, like wooden origami, their soft flesh and fluid moves a living counterfoil to the planes and angles of the props. And at Siobhan Davies studios, a group of primary school children concentrated intently on their lines and sequences, leading the audience up three floors while they peeped through windows, slipped up stairs and disappeared along corridors.

I focus on these performances rather than the headline-grabbing, record-breaking massed invasions of Trafalgar Square, because they’re what touched me most about Big Dance. Breaking records is all well and good, but the Olympics will certainly do it better. And dance itself is all well and good in its usual habitat of theatre, studio and club, but sometimes that very architecture can feel like an enclosure, walling it safely off from the rest of our lives.

So that’s one of the things I like most about Big Dance – that it takes dance out and about into different parts of our lives, enlivening and transforming our buildings and stairways and concourses. And, most important of all, that can enliven our selves. One of the events in Big Dance was an experiment at the Dana centre, which showed that merely watching dance triggers sympathetic neurological responses in the viewer. In other words, movement moves us. It awakens our inner dancer – we dance a bit ourselves, “on the inside”, emotionally. That means that dancing is infectious: you can catch a bit of a dance bug just by watching it. Which is one good reason to take it out and spread it about a bit.

Now then, all those intimations of transmission, telepathy, infection and things inside – they might seem a bit sci-fi/fantasy/horror, no? And true, in my earlier Big Dance blogs, I pictured dance as a zombie invasion, or dancers as alien life forms. Well, now, at the end of Big Dance, I can say that those strange visitations and body morphing and unearthly behaviour – it’s all human. It’s us. That’s the best lesson I’ve taken from Big Dance: people are stranger, more varied, wonderful and unfathomable than we generally acknowledge. We can take dance as weird, unearthly, abnormal, or just as a really stupid thing to do – and it’s still us. How fantastic is that?