5:17pm Monday 19th July 2010
By Stephanie Tye
THINK of a dancer and you probably conjure up an image of a slender body moving in ways that us mere mortals can only dream of.
And while there were several dancers of that type on stage as part of Swindon Dance’s 30th anniversary show, there were also normal Swindonians of all shapes and sizes showing that, at the end of the day, dance is all about having fun.
The programme promised the show would take the audience on a journey through dance, and it did just that.
The evening kicked off with a special piece to commerate 30 years of Swindon Dance, which featured archive footage compiled by filmmaker Alice Powell.
Then it was on to the youngest stars of the night, the Parent and Tots group, with their Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride.
A couple of the little ones looked slightly awe-struck to start with but they soon forgot about the faces in the audience as they boogied away with their grown-up.
DBoyz got plenty of laughs during their Wii Play! routine and the adult jazz group dazzled with their Union Jack dresses and hi-energy dance set to Tina Turner’s River Deep Mountain High.
Former Swindon Dance pupils Jonah Cook and Thomasin Gulgec both returned for the occasion performing breath-taking solo pieces, and a group of pupils from the first year of the Upper School at the Royal Ballet School performed a number of extracts from Raymonda, which were beautiful to watch.
The evening ended with a performance of Caribbean Funk, which was set up as part of the Let’s Dance with Change4Life project.
One of the nicest things about the show was how every single person on the Wyvern stage looked as though they were enjoying themselves.
While there may have been some of the country’s top dancers on the stage, the stars of the show were undoubtedly the everyday folk who give up a few hours of their week to do something they love.
There were whoops, cheers and rapturous applause every time they finished a routine and it was all well-deserved.
I heard more than one person say at the end of the night that it was exhausting just watching the performers – and they were 100 per cent right.
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