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Run Time – 40 minutes. No interval.
Reviewer – Thelma Good.

Contrasting but meldable.

The Story Of The Blues - YDance Production. Daniel Aing, Tara Hodgson and Rodolfo Rivas Franco. © Tilo Stengel 2005.

Three dancers of contrasting but meldable styles take us through the processes that make the denim jeans we all have a pair of. We start off in Africa where the cotton grows. On a screen behind the dancers images of the cotton plants, their flowers and the bolls of cotton are shown as in front. Using dance the performers till, sow, weed and harvest the fibre to Quee McArthur's music inspired by the music of that country till a bale of cotton is produced huge and rectangular in this modern age.

As the cotton starts to be spun the female dancer moves at times as the twisting spinning yarn, at times as the machinery that makes it into thread. Here again the song reflects the places the processes happen in. When the dying of the cloth begins the dancers dance like robots with Daniel Aing's superb upper body strength and street dancing ability again adding diamensions to the other highly skilled and attractive dancers' energies. The music moves from Turkey to Italy and Spain, like the journey of the fibre the music changes as it moves across the globe, each different texture but all very pleasing on the ear.

In Northern Ireland many jeans are sown together so there the dancers become the needle or the stitches to the sound of uilleann pipes. Then there is a fashionshow with the dancers strutting the tough fabric shaped and styled to a country and western song to the jean. The final sequence when the jeans are worn by people across the world is far less well focused than the earlier ones, indeed when the dancers wrote the letters of jeans with their bodies it could have ended then.

It's a generally engaging and certainly very well executed peice to attract and inspire those of seven and up. But a little humour and tightening of the dance narrative so it's clearer what is happening would have helped. The Story of The Blues certainly gains from having dancers from different dance disciplines and choreographer and director Andy Howitt use of them in solo, duo and trio moments makes good use of their talents.
©Thelma Good 5 November 2005 - Published on EdinburghGuide.com

Dancers -
Tara Hodgson, Rodolfo Rivas Franco and Daniel Aing

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