Giannandrea Poesio

Feel the funk

Firsts<br /> Linbury Studio Theatre Gnosis<br /> Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Firsts
Linbury Studio Theatre

Gnosis
Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Funky is not normally a word used to describe the cultural activities at the Royal Opera House. But that adjective encapsulates the essence of Firsts, a showcase of different performing talents, now in its seventh year. Funkiness is indeed what greeted spectators last week at the opening of the 2009 edition, once they had descended into the cheerful vaults of the Linbury Studio Theatre. Multitalented Matt Hennem interacted with the incoming public, by dancing among them with his gravity-defying, mesmerising crystal ball. His elegant, well-choreographed evolutions and improvisations set the tone for the rest of the evening, thus becoming the prelude to equally captivating displays of different skills and bravura. Gemma Palomar invited the audience to ponder on and appreciate silence, by contrasting everyday noises with silence-related maxims, while cavorting with unique mastery on a Chinese pole in Silence to Feel.

Similarly, in Threads, a short, frenzied solo on a claustrophobically limited platform, Keira Martin explored a mixture of personal memories and broader issues of social and spatial constraints through a well-woven and visually breathtaking combination of Irish dancing and physical theatre.

Dazzling and daring acrobatics with the Chinese pole were also the core feature of Dancing Like No One’s Watching, by and with Jon Young. The talented young performer, who boasts an intriguingly varied background, had viewers in stitches with his reading of an all-dancing, nerdy anti-hero inspired by the hit movie Napoleon Dynamite.

In Your Eyes, by and with Vera Tussing and Albert Quesada, the taxonomical-like investigation of the various parts that constitute a dance piece, set to music by J.S.

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