The Sword in the Stone

This Fringe show for kids tells the classic story of how Arthur comes to take the sword from the stone and so become rightful king of all England.  It's billed as interactive theatre, which means that kids are called up to the stage from the audience to take on various roles and activities (such as training to be knights).  The whole audience joins in at various times too; these mainly involve Sir Pelinore's questing beast.

The show is aimed at 5-12 year olds, although I suspect 11 & 12 year olds might find it a little too young for them.  It kept our son and his pal entertained.  The only drawback was that getting kids onto the stage and back sometimes slowed the pace a little too much.  The three actors were good.  I especially liked Merlin's backwards English (he lives backwards through time, you see, and gets easily confused...).

The show is by Spotlites theatre company and is on until Monday.

Scottish Ballet

This was the best show of the handful I've seen so far this year.  What attracted me to book tickets was that one piece was to John Adams's Fearful Symmetries - if you've been paying attention you'll recognise that I'm rather keen on his music.  This was one of three pieces, all of which were good.  The dancing was very tight; these looked like challenging pieces and the dancers certainly required a lot of energy to perform all three together.  I admire anyone that fit (in both senses of the word). 

The first piece was to music by Radiohead, including an accoustic version of Creep, a couple of pieces from OK Computer and others.  It was a fast-paced piece, often with several different groups of dancers on stage at once.  It was impossible to take everything in and this added to the immeidcay and involvement.  Creep was one of the simpler passages: I was impressed how the male dancer was made to look ungainly while still being lithe and co-ordinated, while the two women embodied untouchable perfection.  I enjoyed the piece a lot, although it seemed as if it could have been written in the 1980's.  Mrs. Henry-the-Cow commented that it was as if Mark Morris had never happened; it certainly wasn't as extraordinary as the NDT show we show last year.  But there's a place for well-written, less innovative, dance as well and I don't want to give the impression that this was anything but enjoyable.

The middle dance was very different, being a rarely-performed piece by Trisha Brown.  It began with two people standing facing each other at one side of the stage while another dancer ran round in complicated shapes, sometimes forwards, occasionally backwards.  This slowly developed as other dancers entered, always in small groups.  I got the sense of exploring the space of the stage: for example a pair of dancers might be moving in unison, apparently side-by-side, but as they moved, one would pass behind the standing pair and one in front, like an optical illusion.  Incidentally, one of the standing dancers remained still for the entire half-hour; the other eventually got to move.  As I hope you can tell from this description, this was a fairly unconventional piece, but enjopyable all the same.  The bows at the end were also choreographed, each group of dancers taking their bow in a similar style to the way they had danced.

And so to Fearful Symmetries.  We had an added bonus that we got a live performance of the music, rather than a recording.  This music is ideal for dance: it's rhythmic, fast and has many climaxes.  The dance was written several (15?) years ago and was in similar style to the first piece, with lots of dancers showing lots of energy.  It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it immensely.