Royal Festival Hall, London; Royal Opera House, London
Hip-hop dance has come a long way in recent years, but with the exception of ZooNation's Into the Hoods has had trouble establishing itself as a theatrical form. In terms of spectacle, it's unbeatable. But as Bounce's Insane in the Brain and Boy Blue's Pied Piper have both demonstrated, hip-hop dance struggles when faced with a storyline. As a street-dance form, it's geared towards impact and style statement. Attempts to bend it to narrative have generally resulted in awkward passages of exposition strung between formal display pieces which quickly become repetitious. Into the Hoods represented a vital evolution because choreographer Kate Prince understood that to truly engage an audience, movement must serve character and story, and her work remains the benchmark against which all such shows are likely to be judged.
Flawless, a 10-strong all-male ensemble led by choreographer Marlon "Swoosh" Wallen, came to national attention in 2009 with the TV show Britain's Got Talent, when Simon Cowell described them as "the best dance group I have ever seen". Since then they have featured in music videos with Madonna, Beyonc�, Leona Lewis and others, as well as being crowned "world dance champions" in Bremen, Germany, and taking a lead role in the film StreetDance 3D, released earlier this year.
Their full-evening show Chase the Dream is fast, slick and wittily packaged. Ten more affable guys you couldn't hope to meet. The dancing is clean as a whistle ? this is a tailored-suit show, not some prowling posse in black hoodies ? and skill levels are off the chart. Flips, locking, popping, moonwalking; this is the old-skool repertoire at its formal finest, with a Michael Jackson homage, the statutory futuristic space number, and a witty Matrix spoof with a trench-coated Morpheus fighting off all-comers. There's a strong sense of aspirational message, too, which plays well with a vocal, multi-generational Festival Hall audience.
But somehow it's a long evening. Number follows number, and given the lack of a connecting thread, and any real sense of the individuality of the performers, the 20th backflip has considerably less impact than the first. The absence of any female performer gives the show a distinctly tensionless feel. To watch their Britain's Got Talent finals number on YouTube is to see just how good they are, but it's also to appreciate the limits of pure display. Four minutes of Flawless is a thrill, but 90 something of an endurance test.
Les Patineurs, Frederick Ashton's 1938 skating ballet, knows exactly when to call it a day. It ends with one of the most unforgettable images in the Royal Ballet repertoire: the Blue Boy, here danced by the brilliant Steven McRae, whirling round and round in a seemingly endless pirouette in the twilight. It's a sequence charged with the joy of youth, but also with the edge of sadness that one encounters again and again in Ashton's ballets. The heart-catching knowledge that all this must pass. That life, like a ballet performance, is an evanescent thing, to be seized before all is darkness. And all of this is expressed in a pirouette � la seconde, a step which, to a dancer of McRae's accomplishment, can be dashed off almost without thought. But context is everything, and in his blazing determination to resist the dying of the light, McRae captures Ashton's art and makes it his own.
It's the culmination of a piece which, if it is to play to fulfilling effect, must be taken at full tilt, but with absolute precision. The ensemble take this to heart, with Kenta Kura and Kristen McNally visibly having the time of their lives. As the couple in white, Rupert Pennefather and Sarah Lamb evince a witty, superior smugness. You may look, they seem to say as he swings her over his back so that her legs flare like the spreading tail-feathers of a dove, but kindly keep your distance. And there's an intoxicating moment when Samantha Raine, as one of the Entr�e girls, hurtles into her fouett�s with such reckless, wide-smiling abandon that you catch your breath. She survives, triumphant, and goes on to face further hazard as Jemima Puddle-Duck in Tales of Beatrix Potter, stalked by Gary Avis's lethally charming Fox. And if you don't know how that story ends, I'm not going to tell you.
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