The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2022 - Issue 31

bitetheatre D1 Dance Company A crew from Lima, Peru, D1 Dance Company, are an ensemble of five dancers with a trippy backdrop pro- jection of what seemed like a sped-up helicopter ride video, with scenes racing towards us as the dancers simulate running on the spot. A clever bit to their performance is when a solo dancer held a bucket and ‘caught’ some drops of water falling from the top of the screen into her bucket. Words are spoken in their native language but transcribed onto the screen about the water shortage back in their country. The fra- gility, vulnerability, challenges and resiliencies pose to their so- ciety as they search for identity and voice. An all-ensemble dance with buckets ensues to a rhythmic tune of Agua (Water) by Manzanita Su Conjunto; at one point, they placed a foot each into their buckets and carried on dancing, even break dancing. I giggled and was impressed at this cho- reography, as I am with the solo dance by one of the females as she popped and locked to the music that’s untypical of hip-hop dancing but works as the others stand with their buckets over their heads. The five dancers had a beautiful on-stage relationship that filled the stage and kept you watching as they seamlessly interweaved contemporary with hip-hop dance movements. Even a pepper- ing of tap dance makes its way into the performance. The final moments of their set had the tempo increased and their actions more frantic until they all poetically crashed to the floor as the light went down on them. Beautiful! BirdGang Ltd A UK dance crew, BirdGang Ltd, presented us with a set called A Birds Eye View . Never before have I witnessed dance incorporated with magic, so I was ecstatic to learn these ‘movement architects’ would combine two of my favourite performing genres into one. I could hardly wait for them to start and had my eyes peeled on the stage to ensure I didn’t miss a single trick. Two magi- cian-typical boxes were placed on the stage. A man dances with a masked puppet taken from one box and presents it to the oth- er box, centre-stage, where a hand pops up out of the box and grabs the puppet, which I see is a white mask attached to a black hood. Then, a man emerges from the box wearing the hooded pup- pet over his head, whilst krumping, and lands under a spotlight as the first man retreats into the smokey purple shadows. The emerged man removes a second mask from his face and starts dancing with it, then suddenly the stage goes pitch black for a beat. When they turn back on, two other dancers pop out from behind, also masked and holding a separate mask up at face height, as if by magic, so I resign to believing it is magic. How could they have gotten into position from offstage like that in a single second? They commence using the masks to lock, pop and vogue dance, all to the trippy music of Evil Needle by An- tidote. The stage lighting changes to grey as another crew member in a royal blue lab coat slow-walks onto the stage. These three appear to fear this character so much that they retreat off stage, leaving just him. He lifts his mask, looking around and just as he replac- es it, a lit golf-sized ball rolls onto the stage. As he picks it up, a group run in wearing safari hats and khaki trouser costumes and stops still as he turns round to them, evoking memories of playing grandma's footsteps in my childhood.