balletLORENT spreads the love with Best Worst Dances
Winning debut for work-in-progress
Glitter ball, mirrors, lights, bar, jukebox… the unmistakable signs of balletLORENT in After Dark mode.
Then an hour’s worth of uninhibited dancing, veering at times towards the slightly unhinged but always joyfully exuberant and wonderfully watchable.
Friday night at the John Marley Centre (balletLORENT HQ in Newcastle’s West End) saw the first public performance of Best Worst Dances by a cast of 10 professional dancers and 16 people who had auditioned in response to a public call-out.
It wasn’t a one-off performance because there’s another tonight (Saturday, November 15) but after that… who knows?
Liv Lorent, company founder, didn’t seem to. She described it as a “love project” done for fun, an experiment and something of a work-in-progress.
But she must know she’s onto something, elevating dad dancing and its myriad eccentric cousins to artform status.
Watching from one of the cabaret tables set around the dance floor, you couldn’t not smile. Questionable dance moves done really well are really good – hence the best worst dances.
The mission was to explore what it means to dance like nobody’s watching and the cast, ranging in age from 17 to 70s, rose to the challenge, doing what came naturally.
And they did it to a wildly eclectic playlist (LCD Soundsystem, Roy Orbison, Serge Gainsbourg and the morbidly miserable Jim E. Brown effing his head off) – 16 songs chosen to get the joint jumping.
The performers danced singly, in twos or threes and sometimes all together, the costumes as wildly varied as the soundtrack. The pros were often up a height, dancing on the piano and sometimes with hula hoops. The amateurs matched them step for step.
Everyone played their part and seemed to be having as much fun as the audience. If they were exhausted at the end, as they must have been, they didn’t show it, sticking around for some post-show best worst bopping.
Coming up for balletLORENT is a spring tour of their production of Snow White but hopefully the company won’t let this life-affirming project go. There’s a lot more love it can spread around.