Dance Animal is a troupe of eight from Montreal, where, from glancing at their press clippings, they appear to be the darlings of the dance theatre scene. It’s not too hard to see why: their show is pretty inventive, the choreography is all right, and there’s numerous references to and in-jokes about different areas of Montreal.
So if I was a dance-loving Montrealer, you’re probably looking at a four or five star review. Alas, I’ve never set foot in Montreal, and I’m less of a dance aficionado than I am a dance cynic. Pie-in-the-sky references to “expressing oneself through dance” and “dance uniting the world” and the like, which are peppered throughout Dance Animal’s Toronto Fringe show, tend to turn me off.
Still, that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy much of Dance Animal’s show. At the risk of appearing slightly less masculine in front of my blog cohorts, it’s a cute show, light-hearted and with a few laughs. The choreography in it seems pretty good to my untrained eye, though the first few numbers look more like a coordinated, high-energy aerobics class. Between dances each member of the group comes out to introduce themselves (there’s Dance Salmon, Dance Chicken, Dance Ladybug, etc.) and tell a little tale of how Dance Tiger – aka group founder, choreographer and director Robin Henderson (in the middle, holding the ball in the photo above) – recruited them for the group.
A lot of the references to Montreal in these monologues are quite possibly lost on a Toronto crowd. And the show has a couple of downright bizarre dance numbers in it, none stranger than the one in which a troupe member comes out in a furry rabbit suit with a whip wearing a corset and panties and proceeds to do a rather sleazy striptease. Yeah. It’s the stuff a furries’ dreams and/or nightmares are made of.
But some of the monologues have some real laughs, and some of the dance numbers are really good, the best probably being the cops & robbers & Spiderman dance done to a jazzy version of the 60’s Spidey cartoon show theme. I feel obligated to say something about the music, writing for an indie blog as I do: the obligatory Gwen Stefani and Beyonce tracks are balanced out somewhat with Boney M’s “Rasputin,” the aforementioned Spiderman swing tune, and, oddly enough, a Coldplay song.
If you like choreographed dance numbers more than I do (and judging by the energy of the crowd, there’s quite a number of people that do) you’ll probably really like this show. If you don’t, and you’re still taken to see this show by, say, a girlfriend or other enthusiastic fan, you’ll probably be just fine.
