Review: The Big Mission

Crescent Theatre, Birmingham 4 February 2005
Reviewed by Terry Grimley for the Birmingham Post

Colin Poole's solo performance The Box Office was the highlight of the evening.

There was no doubt about the opening night highlight of this four-day festival of new black British dance.

If evidence was needed that dance can explore humanity's darkness as well as its light, Colin Poole's solo performance The Box Office provided it to disturbing effect.

First establishing a context of urban stress by juxtaposng animated film of a daunting council estate with Bernstein's 'There's a Place for Us', Poole presented himself as a grotesque hermaphrodite wearing a sinister two-faced golliwog mask and a costume incorporating half a tutu.

The mask implied a rich layering of meanings, sometimes looking like a child's painting while also suggesting a horror movie bogeyman. When the reverse, female, face was presented to the audience Poole's limbs appeared dislocated, suggesting an insect or one of the women in Picasso's painting 'Les demoiseles d'Avignon'- appropriately, since the central orgiastic episode dealt with commercialised sex.

This edgy white-knuckle ride of a show ended up in calmer waters, to the accompaniment of a Schubert string quartet.

Poole's originality was flanked by two pieces which, in widely contrasting ways, both reflected stereotypes of black dance. Ruff/Cut Dance Theatre's Silent Caves, with its evocative African setting and costumes, looked gorgeous. But it was almost killed off before it got going by a wearyingly wordy introduction and despite some elegant dancing it sagged under the weight of its meaningful torpor.

Martin Robinson's Yin & Yang went to the other, urban, extreme as Robinson delivered his metallic solo performance to the near-deafening accompaniment of a trio of DJs. Representative, perhaps, but not obviously innovative.