I’m definitely going to CUTAZZ’s next show. I came away from MOVE! impressed – I had no idea how many brilliant dancers there are in Cambridge. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for choreographers. The dances consisted for the most part of standard Grade 3 Modern moves strung together, often into disappointingly clichéd formations – why do you all like pyramids so much? And what’s the big deal about crouching in a big clump at the back of the stage? With so many talented dancers, this seemed a bit of a shame.

There were also some rather odd choreo-music-costume combinations. One tap dance to Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can” dressed up the girls in can-can skirts. Nice pun, I suppose. And in fairness they were very nice skirts, but really? Tap dancing to Fatboy Slim? Equally incongruous were determinedly fixed grins in the face of BodyRockers’ “I like the way you move,” and tapping to edgy hiphop: tap dancing is many things, but edgy it is not. And then there was the Alesha Dixon number. The dancers bound out in bright costumes armed with brooms and feather dusters in neon colours, and then out rings the music: “He does nothing, the boy does no-thing!!”. I suppose this was supposed to be charmingly tongue-in-cheek. It wasn’t. The dance’s overall aesthetic was awesome; and coupled with far more creative choreography than the show’s bulk – this just about saved it. 

And then, the lighting. Patchy, patchy, patchy. Redeeming features included mesmerizing projections of dancers’ shadows onto the cyc, beautiful colour effects on their skin, and UV highlighting (really, it was cool). But with a stage such as the Munford’s, one should be creating strikingly beautiful tableaux instead of leaving an inconsistently lit stage to resemble one of my little brother’s watercolours. The disco ball flashed painfully in the audience’s eyes. And its reflections clashed with the cyc. So this was basically a lesson in how not to do a disco ball, and what with lazy cueing constantly leaving dancers in darkness, the lighting too was a bit of a shame.

But the real shame is that the verve and vitality that came through in the finale was lacking in the rest of the show. This is not to say the bulk of the show was lazily danced – far from it – but there was a spirit and electricity to the closing number that would have been wonderful to see in the other dances. And if only it could be applied to the choreography, then we would be seeing something really special. By Kate Poston

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