No, nothing to do with the new president or the exchange rate for the dollar - it’s the title of my daughter’s school’s dance extravaganza that I went along to at the Altrincham Garrick Playhouse the other night.
I’ve never really understood why anyone would want to watch other people dancing – The Ballet, Riverdance, even Strictly Ballroom leaves me cold, and isn’t dancing a doing thing, not a watching thing? I used to like to dance and I must have been pretty good at it – do you remember that scene in Saturday Night Fever where Tony Manero starts to dance and the floor empties as the other dancers stop to watch? Well, I could empty the dance floor in seconds, only nobody bothered to watch - close though.
Anyway, back to the show. We were given a programme as we arrived and I was pleased to see that we weren’t being short-changed on the seven pounds entrance fee, there were a total of twenty-two individual dance pieces for us to delight in – that’s around thirty-two pence a dance - a bargain! The dances, the fifteen minute interval (with the mandatory huge queue for the bar), and the usual thank you speeches at the end of the show (I just want to thank a few people…zzzz) were going to take a couple of hours - I’ve been to these shindigs before so I knew what to expect, and I’d forgotten to take along my boiled sweets – It was going to be a long sugar-free evening. The girls put a huge amount of effort and practice into their dance and most of the performances are very good but there are an awful lot of them, so I knew to applaud gently and briefly to avoid any bruising on my palms by the end of the night.
As the title suggests (twice) the show had an American theme, so each dance had been choreographed around a song with a link to something American - although I’m not really sure what ‘Thriller’ has to do with the US unless all Americans are Zombies…leave it! The show opened with ‘Hairspray’ (Hairspray is an American invention – other examples include: Napalm, the Colt 45, enforced Democracy), danced by year eight - it seemed to be loosely based around the way to spell out “I am drowning” with semaphore signals – how so many arms could move in so many directions without any two managing to be in sync negated the laws of coincidence. I notice that one of the strange things about girls of pre-teen years is how much they can vary in height and shape, particularly when they are all wearing black leotards with short, homemade, elastic-waist skirts in a really busy palm leaf pattern – some are so tiny, others so tall, some are really skinny and others not.
The next dance was performed by year seven. The electric blue foil pom-poms they listlessly wafted about as they stomped away to ‘Oh Mickey’ were not really big enough and didn’t quite have the impact of the Tony Basil video (or the shocked hair – hairspray is an American invention), but they managed to keep it pretty much together and nobody dropped a pom-pom. The evening progressed - dances were performed thick and fast, one after another, until after a while they seemed to roll into a single dance. The dry ice in ‘Thriller’ was so thick that there were times when you couldn’t really see the dancers who attempted a Moonwalk section (well at least they tried…Moonwalking is hard…ask Neil Armstrong – ouch!) I was expecting ‘New York New York’ to be the song that I knew (and loved) but it turned out to be a disco diva anthem (which I loved even more) – there were all sorts of dances ‘We’re the kids from America’ as a mini-ballet, ‘Hip Hop’ as a kind of street dance without much street, ‘Rodeo’ a cowgirl ballet study in shorts and checked shirt (no Colt 45 though), ‘Candyman’ a tap by snowmen wearing white fingerless gloves (I may have been asleep and dreamt that one) – tune after tune, performance after performance, applause after applause.
There seemed to be a lot of tappers this year, they were all pretty good, but it took me a while to work out that the ‘tap’ on the recorded music for ‘42nd Street’ didn’t really match the’ tap’ the dancers were doing. The ‘Hot Honey Rag’, despite some great costumes, wasn’t really ‘hot’ (unlike Napalm) and some of the girls who performed ‘Surfing USA’, whilst obviously having a great time, seemed determined to perform their dance routine in the wings out of the critical eyes of the audience. I’d never heard the track ‘Put your hands up for Detroit’ before but the dance was very cool, the girls moved like automatons and wore funky sunglasses and their hair high on top of their heads (hairspray again – God bless America), the ballet routine to ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ was quirky and worked really well (or so I said at the time although I forget why), and both of the dances Holly performed were brilliant and incredibly entertaining (well, she is my daughter) – especially ‘American Boy’ which was well rapped-up (I have it on good authority that this is the correct term in the hood).
The finale was uplifting if a little delayed. Something must have gone wrong backstage and it left twenty or so girls crouching on the stage in the dark waiting for their music to begin. It went on so long that I began to think that the crouching in the dark was the dance- avant garde c'est manifique! - but I was wrong, once underway every single dancer who had appeared in the show managed to squeeze on stage until it was completely full with smiling girls dancing to Glen Miller. Each of the girls had each been given a khaki T-shirt to wear and I thought they looked quite stylish, but according to my daughter and her friends they were “just so totally random” – so ‘wrong again’ Dad - I wonder what that says about me?
The thank-you speeches took even longer this year - there were more people to thank I guess - and I applauded each of the helpers as they received what looked suspiciously like a bottle of wine in a wine-bag (perhaps that was why there were more helpers). Seeing all those wine-bags reminded me that I was desperate for a glass and, although I’d had fun, I was a little relieved when it was over – watching all that dancing was quite exhausting. It really had been fun though despite some of the girls being so focused (terrified?) of getting the steps right that they couldn’t manage a smile, and a few who would have made Pinocchio look bendy - but they all deserved the cheers and applause of the crowd (and it wasn’t simply parents applauding their daughters) it really was a genuinely entertaining show and the dancing was great.
So great that I May even dig out my white suit - clear the floor guys, here I come! 'Night fever, night fever - you know how to do it!'
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