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Theatre

London,

The Cholmondeleys & The Featherstonehaughs: Yippeee!!! (2006)

Description: Acclaimed modern dance show choreographed by Lea Anderson, a mixture of Busby Berkeley-style movement within a set of complex production numbers. Music by Steve Blake.



Rating: 3 out of 5 Sarah Frater's rating
Rating: 3 out of 5

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Dir: Lea Anderson.

Cast: The Cholmondeleys, The Featherstonehaughs, The Yum Yum Band

Sadler's Wells Rosebery Avenue, EC1R 4TN

Phone: 0844412 4300

Website: www.sadlerswells.com

Email: ticket.office@sadlerswells.com

Extra info: Air Conditioning, Food, Pub

Transport: Tube: Angel Transport for London , Tube / Bus: 19, 38, 341 Transport for London

Voyeurism on parade

Yippeee!!!
Yippeee!!! evokes the world of Busby Berkeley

By Sarah Frater
6 Nov 2006


Busby Berkeley was a great dance director for stage and screen, and worthy reams have been written about his huge show numbers and innovative use of the camera as "roving eye". For roving eye read "peeping Tom", a fact Lea Anderson has grasped with characteristic glee.

The choreographer has looked at all those shots Berkeley took from between legs, from above and his intimately up-close ones of faces and created a 90-minute show that both nods to his innuendo and winks at our ready collusion with it.

In Yippeee!!! Anderson doesn't so much reproduce Berkeley numbers - that wouldn't be possible with 12 dancers when he had hundreds - as evoke his world, the frantic costumes changes in the wings, the nudity, the on-stage/ offstage tensions, the sawdust and stardust, and the sexually charged world that is the theatre.

Yippeee!!! is set as a stage within a stage. The dancers change costumes in full view, just beyond the wing lights, which are positioned on stage. All 12 dancers are showgirls, although given Anderson's Cholmondeleys are female and her Featherstonehaughs are male, the girls come in all orientations.

As we've come to enjoy from Anderson's cabaret-cum-dance productions, the costumes are glam slam-meets-S&M. The dancers look nearly nude in flesh-colour body stockings, and smile with dazzling menace with what look like glittered tooth guards.

Throughout the show they don ever more outlandish outfits - plastic camiknickers with mice tails, masks, furs and combined glittery bottoms and mono-bosoms. They move in an camply ragtag unison, revealing the seductive, hypnotic power of pattern that Berkeley so cleverly filmed. Anderson gives us glimpses of the lines and chevrons and perfectly unified patterning of the military march that he so loved.

Indeed, it's a little-known ballet fact that Berkeley discovered his flair for drilling groups of showgirls not in the ballet studio, or on the MGM lot, but in the US army during the First World War.

Girls, close-ups, army marching ... The problem for Anderson, who has always thrived on sexual subversion, is that despite his Art Deco refinements, Berkeley was already loaded with it. Anderson makes the same joke, albeit with considerable aplomb.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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