Thursday 16 September 2010

The Medium of Dance

...is an area where I've never been truly happy - I don't so much dance as check all my limbs are in working order (as someone once observed of Ricky Martin).
The presence of a great choreographer will ease the troubled birth of movement even for me, though, and Heather Douglas has been wafted in from dance paradise to fill this role. Now, if you're over 30 you probably walked into a lamppost whilst gawping at a photo of Heather in the original cast of "Chicago" in the West End. I think I still have a bruise from that.
On the page there's not much to keep Heather busy, but on its feet there's plenty. We spend a hefty chunk of today getting the (quite dangerous) leap into the Seine right, looking at the vertigo moments and working the Madeleine death, working on a movement montage illustrating World War II and cracking the vexing issue of how to demonstrate the nature of Roger and Renee's relationship without actually demonstrating it, if you follow me. During this process there are casualties: feet - trodden on; fingers - trapped in moving parts of the set; the bed - clearly not designed for two people to descend on together at speed. Back to the drawing board, IKEA!

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