Article Date: 04th May 2008
Article Title: Never judge dancers by their dance wear

It seems that barely a day goes by without a new club, bar or restaurant opening in central London. A friend of mine who gets invited to lots of these events because of his job as a reviewer told me that he could easily attend up to 10 events a night if he wanted to, such is the deluge of invites and press releases that arrive on his desk on a daily basis. The fierce competition for valuable press coverage and publicity means that the people who organize these events have to constantly come up with new and innovative ways to make their venue stand out from the crowd. Often this equates to ever more lavish supplies of free food and drink, but my friend reckons that the thing that critics such as him always remember is good entertainment. In fact, he attended an event recently where the quality of the entrees paled into insignificance next to the impression caused by the dancers and their dance wear.

The event in question took place at a new bar in the Covent Garden area of England’s capital city. Having received the usual invites, he nearly went to another opening around the corner before deciding he would rather go to a bar than a restaurant that evening. When he first arrived at the venue it seemed like there would be little to distinguish it from any other bar in the city. There was the usual free food and drink, as well as the inevitable – and somewhat tiresome – sprinkling of minor celebrities (who add nothing to these events, according to my friend): certainly nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. Until the dancers took to the stage in their amazing dance wear, that is.

Indeed, until this point in proceedings my friend was skeptical that this bar would even make it until Christmas. In the previous 12 months he had been to five launch events on this same street and only one of those places was still up and running. In fact, the building that played home to this new bar had also played host to at least three different restaurants and bars in the last five years. Just as my friend was about to write it off as another soulless, generic bar, the dancers took to the stage and changed everything. What immediately grabbed my friend’s attention was their dance wear.

Being something of a traditionalist, my friend was more used to seeing dancers in ballet shoes and tutus. This was his first experience of urban dance and, in-keeping with the rest of the evening’s events, he was immediately skeptical when the saw the 12-strong dance troupe take to the stage in their dance wear: an array of baggy trousers, hooded tops and baseball caps, all outrageously decorated with vibrant colours and graffiti logos. His first thought was that in desperation, the event organizers must have gone out onto the street and found a bunch of kids to come in and liven up proceedings. But his prejudices were about to be completely turned on their head.

What he saw on that stage was one of the most entertaining performances he had ever seen. It was lively, engaging, innovative and, most importantly, brilliantly choreographed. It just goes to show that you should never judge a book by its cover or, in this case, never judge a group of dancers by their dance wear.