DecoDance vs Penny Serenade, Sarah Lewis & Steve Johnstone, Midnight Orange Productions

The band wins hands down, charting coupledom’s choppy waters, and the salt between the sides


This is Jamm Heart is billed as a battle between seven-strong dance group DecoDance and six-piece band Penny Serenade. In fact, there was no contest: Mel Simpson’s choreography follows the music as eagerly as a puppy chasing a ball; and besides, the band simply wins, hands down. Their ensemble is tauter, their numbers catchier. In natty red and black, they even look better. The dancers, in gauzy red shifts, appear in a cod-classical tableau, Kyle Stevenson swaying like a male Aphrodite flanked by two nymphs. There follows plenty of fluttering and frothing, Mexican waves, a waltz-by of women, and a final meeting of boy with girl as everyone makes hand-on-heart gestures. The dancers lack the skill and the stage presence to carry this off convincingly.

Sarah Lewis and Steve Johnstone are a much more interesting pair. The revelations of Orca the goldfish is their misleading title for a sequence of scenes highlighting different facets of coupledom. First there’s a freewheeling harmony – the honeymoon period, I guess – as they tail after and tumble over each other. Soon their bodies seem magnetised, softly repelling each other so that they never quite touch. There’s a section based on tit-for-tat kicks, one on supportive lifts, one – gently comic – in which she simply refuses to look him in the eye. It’s an understated portrait, but nuanced, affecting and effective.

There’s yet more coupledom in we wear the same trousers. A line of salt bisects the stage, and the choreography is a series of personal metaphors for that dividing line. On either side of the line, Sophie Arstall and Thomas Goodwin (who are indeed in identical trousers) bridge the gap between them by leaning against each other in cantilevered shapes. They cross the line; they smear it, blurring the boundaries. Their arms link into a seamless loop, or tangle up in knots. There’s plenty of physical intelligence here, though not yet enough polish for a finished piece.