Blaze: the Streetdance Sensation, Peacock Theatre

Wednesday, 17 March 2010 01:21 Written by Ismene Brown

Blaze: 'This exuberance is guaranteed to rejuvenate you faster than a Red Bull' Sadler's Wells Theatre

With a title like that, and a slug across the posters that so boastingly prejudges last night's premiere, some of us might keep our sceptical specs on when we turn up at the spirits-lowering Peacock Theatre to see this latest leap by mainstream stage forces onto the bandwagon of the most exciting trend in dance of the past 15 years. Sheathe those sceptical specs. This is a show blazing with talent and young exuberance, and it will rejuvenate you faster than a Red Bull.

An 80-year-old was sitting in front of me last night, his face split with an ear-to-ear grin, clapping hopelessly out of time with the ululating audience around him as he watched a trio of ripped black guys doing phenomenal things upside-down. These three men, from Brazil, the US and the Philippines via London, are world-class b-boys, and their solos punctuate the smartly clipped ensemble with some barely believable feats. You think you’ve seen most things possible in whirling speed and twitchy one-handed balances from Mouse, the stocky Filipino former world champion of b-boying - but he gets capped every time by Neguin from Brazil, who slides across the stage on his head, or makes your vision blur with his complex windmilling jumps. Hip hop trumps the West End every time - how much more exacting, individual and fresh streetdance is than those tired, calculating gyrations in musicals, how welcome its straight-gazing, throwaway brilliance.

Anthony van Laast, who also directed the rather too clean Swedish breakdance show Bounce, here seems to have picked up tips from Riverdance’s successful exposition to the public of Irish dancing, in adopting a good-humoured international style that will tour without hesitation anywhere in the world. There’s no story, just a series of mostly magnetic dance ensembles, in which a team of inexhaustible girls and boys recruited from all over Europe display the wonderful range of streetdance argots, from the witty expressiveness of popping and locking to the acrobatic daredevilry of breaking. The message is pleasurably upbeat: that to be young is to be tirelessly energetic, disciplined, gregarious, messy, engaging, decorous (boys one side, girls the other) and only slightly risqué. The boys bounce off their beds, the girls share music through their headphones. No one takes drugs, packs guns, joins gangs or upsets their mum. It’s really really sweet.

It’s a credit to all the middle-aged creators that they kept that naivety in it. Blaze has its faults, one being that it’s 90 minutes without an interval, when it would benefit from a chop after exactly 45 minutes, when everybody could pile out for a drink and ask just what those kids’ knees are made of - Kryptonite? They could then also exclaim over the brilliant set wall, which looks precisely like a revolting teenager’s bedroom, drawers and boxes piled haphazardly on top of each other, clothes heaped everywhere, computer screens, hi-fi speakers, a fridge for the sodas, and a bath kept safely away high up where it can be ignored.

The music of course is set lethally loud, but you sort of get used to it as the generic rap ‘n’ scratch start gives way to slightly more interesting selections (the music overall lacks the cheesy inventiveness that underpins the best streetdance shows). Somewhere it was thought wise to cave in to the reality TV show format parody, where MC DJ Hazze (a big guy with a big mouth but no mean dance talent) brings on a clapometer, registering Wack, Sweet and Blazin’. This is cheesy in the wrong way. As is a feeble number inspired by fashion catwalks. But then follows the Puck-like Swede Tommy Franzén, late of Bounce and later of the TV show So You Think You Can Dance, in one of his scintillating solos.

Yes, the guys do always have the edge in streetdance - it’s that kind of style, where the cocks of the walk have the brightest feathers. But among the women, the buxom French beauty of Marion Gallet doesn’t need to do too much to seduce, while the lissome undulations, pert bum and flying hair of Jomecia Oosterwolde has enough sheen on the preen to work the crowd into whoops.

And no, this lacks the real dirty evocative chill of a powerful experience like Kenrick Sandy’s Pied Piper or Rennie Harris's Rome and Jewels. Possibly, for purists, Blaze is doing to authentic streetdance what Hollywood/Broadway did to tap - steal it from the black streets, whiten it up and perfume it for the international market - yet it’s sincerely good fun and will certainly be blazin’ for a lot longer than this first run, and surely on larger stages too.