Dance Thursday

After my Swing dance lesson I went to see a contemporary dance performance, My Brother, My Sister, put on by Quantum Leap. It's 'an auditioned, elite youth dance ensemble' but the youth aspect seemed a misnomer as the dancing was of a level comparable with any professional company. Not sure about all of the choreography, which seemed in some parts to be pandering to 'youth concerns' which did not sit well with the rest of the work. Seeing as the dancers were mature in their craft and the audience was just mature there was some disconnect in what we were expected to take from this aspect. The use of video and voice over to try and bang home points about self esteem, social isolation and violence were also completely mistaken, as the dancers were quite capable of conveying any message required. But apart from those small quibbles it was extraordinarily good.
I was by chance in the front row centre, so although I had the disadvantage of not being easily able to take in all the movement, which from a large company was spread across the stage, but I did have the advantage of being very close which was very involving and allowed me to hear the movement on the stage, which I like.

Addendum

So the morning after, a couple of things.

The image of moving parallel lines across the stage is still very vivid.

But the annoyance about the videos prompts me to think. One part of it was a display of statistics supposedly to highlight social injustice. Now statistics like this when used without explanation or understanding always annoy me. I think of the Sickipedia joke 'statistically, 9 out 10 people enjoy gang rape' - which shows how presenting a statistic without knowledge, explanation or understanding is dumb.
One of the ones used here (they were all crap) was the bald statement that 0.13 % of the population has 25% of the worlds wealth.
Which plays on the nonsensical concept that there is finite wealth, with the implication that if there are some rich people and some poor, that the rich have taken from the poor, as though there was only a limited amount of wealth to share. Wealth is not finite someone growing rich is not at the expense of someone else, that’s the basic theory of wealth creation, the supply of wealth is not fixed like that. Those 0.13 have created wealth, i.e. created more goods/services/money, they have not reduced the supply of anything to anyone else. It's pretty simple stuff.
I blame some of this idiocy on Christianity, with the idea planted that if a man has 2 coats, he should give one away. That's fine as far as it goes (2 somewhat happy people) but in the long term the joint wealth of the 2 people is still limited to 2 coats. Wouldn't it be better for the wider population that more coats are produced, isn't it better that a new coat is created for the other person, than to give up one of yours. For when a new coat is created for the other with no coat, now there exist in the world 3 coats, and so overall wealth grows.

But what really annoys after all is that bad choreography (or whoever was responsible for the multimedia elements) has overshadowed the skill and beauty of the dancers, and not for artistic reasons, but just because they wanted to overlay art with some token mis-understood politics. Oh but the music was very good btw.