Last Tuesday three wannabe dancer/choreographers tried their luck and justified the whole experiment.
Tilly Lee-Kronick is a one-woman enterprise incorporating circus, speech and dance.
In Ripe she appeared in the best traditional sawdust style of feathers and sequins, while standing demurely beneath a trapeze.
“You probably expect me to do something,” she said.
Well, of course she was up on the wires before you could say no.
Her vocal questioning of the audience continued as she did her thing on the swing before turning into a banana – don’t ask me why.
A lot of effort went into her physical and vocal experiment but, like most solo artists, she needs an independent producer to knock her act into shape.
Yasmine Lindskog of SkogDans made Gravity Bears The Truth apparently for herself, backed by two men and three women.
Lindskog led her troupe through an introduction sending up classical music before taking centre stage, leaving her colleagues to fill in the background as well as they could.
The costumes were bright and cheerful and the dancers appeared to be having a good time.
However Lindskog soon took over at stage centre and stuck there.
Her approach was painfully undergraduate: wriggling through movements with no meaning or direction; similar, I presume, to writing words with no relevance.
Pretty much a waste of everybody’s time.
But the best was yet to come in the form of Ashley Goosey in BDblaq’s Sense.
He joined dance maker Rikkai Scott to explore the loss of sight.
In startling contrast to all the evening’s modern dance performers, every pore of Goosey’s body moves.
This man is a dancer.
Yes, he puts his tongue out and wriggles in the contemporary style but his frame contracts and flies apart putting a story into movement that we can all understand.
Scott’s facial contortions were overshadowed by Goosey’s physical expressiveness.
There must be a dance maker knocking around who can do something special with such a talent.
The Place, London WC1 (Tickets: 020 7121 1100/theplace.org.uk; £16. Until February 23)