The Stage

Telling Tales

Published Monday 15 February 2010 at 17:45 by Pat Ashworth

This magical new dance theatre work produces the sort of giggles from small children that start to spread and make everyone else smile as well. It’s a delightful offering of four stories from two international choreographers who temper playfulness and absurdity with moments of quite breath-catching beauty.

A scene from Telling Tales at Deda, Derby Photo: Alan Fletcher

There’s physicality and drollery in Helene Blackburn’s The Hare and the Tortoise, where Isabelle Cressy and Ezekiel Oliveira make faces and shuffle bottoms in fast competition along bright red miniature chairs. Blackburn’s second piece, based on Grimm’s The Golden Goose, opens with a slow, hypnotic scattering of feathers until Amy Butler and Keir Patrick are ankle-deep in them. You can hear a pin drop, remarkable in an audience of four to seven year olds.

Cabrera’s, It’s Mine, is a comic tug of war between dancers Laura Wheatley and David Ogle, with a giant coat that envelops them both and some stripy, stretchy tights that fuse and intertwine their bodies so much you can’t tell whose zebra limbs are whose.

Big, soft, mysterious bundles are a recurrent, interlinking theme. You never know what’s going to be inside them. In Sea of Clothes from Visto Lo Visto, danced by the whole company, one dancer emerges from a bundle that looks like rising dough, into a kaleidoscope of colour and an exuberant tossing of silk that ends with the fantasy of a sailing boat made from a stretched sheet. The music is uplifting and the best thing of all is the joy that emanates from the dancers.