The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs
Double bill of Flesh & Blood and Double Take
Laban, Deptford 23 November 2004

The Cholmondeleys & The Featherstonehaughs came together at Laban to perform (separately) award-winning pieces by choreographer & director, Lea Anderson. The Featherstonehaughs performed Flesh & Blood, originally created for the all-female Cholmondeleys in 1989. In turn The Cholmondeleys performed the all-male Featherstonehaughs' repertoire - a selection of witty choreographic gems from their shows from 1989 to 1995 - or was it the other way round, no great matter!

This evening of gender-reversal dancing (by the end we were a little confused who was who and which was which!) gave us moderate pleasure and (in the first half) some pain!

MusicalPointers approaches dance from a musical perspective first, and the music let loose by the small electrified band in the first half assaulted our ears at a decibel level which seemed to be intended to stun critical thinking. One is at first seduced by the excellence of Laban's sound equipment; no worries here about distortion.

We know both that the young like their music loud for partying and gigs, and too that this is at the cost of future hearing impairment. Having covered our ears and eventually departed for the peace of the bar after half an hour or so, we returned for other set to receive sympathetic comments that it had indeed been too loud.

I am sure the Bonnie Bird Theatre operates under stringent fire regulations; it made us wonder if Laban (which prides itself on a health service to look after its dance students) has got noise level monitoring equipment?

As to the dancing of both groups, we felt that its emphasis on unison movement contradicted the individuality which we had come to think axiomatic in modern dance, as with Laban's own company Transitions?

Acclimatising ourselves to the dry-ice fog which spread into the auditorium, we saw gradually emergent precision movements by dancers in twos and threes, not unlike the military regimentation of, say, violinists in a classical symphony orchestra. The Cholmondeleys (or were they the Featherstonehaughs?) just looked like men in long dresses; no frisson of illusion there.

The Featherstonehaughs (or Cholmondeleys) gave us a far more entertaining succession of short items, well put together and announced informally by the crossed-dressed girls. It was an amusing and enjoyable sequence, and their assumed masculinity was carried off with considerable flair and imagination. Here too, however, people did things in twos and threes and one wondered why that sort of discipline is imposed? To be on the safe side we swapped for seats at the end of a row, but the sound level for The Featherstonehaughs was, mercifully, OK and by the end we were restored and glad we'd come.