First, a word from the audience (of primary school children): “The costumes were sick!” says one, raving about the dancing skeletons. Another says: “I have a question, was it meant to scare us?”
This is not your average kids’ Christmas show. It is the first family offering from National Dance Company Wales, with choreographer Lea Anderson at the helm. Anderson is best known as creator of the all-female and all-male dance groups the Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs, with their accessible art-school aesthetic inspired by film and pop culture. Since losing her Arts Council funding in 2011, Anderson’s work has appeared more sporadically, on film, in clubs and galleries and stages around the world.
The theme here is, very loosely, the story of evolution, although whether the children will know what a Luca is (last universal common ancestor) or get the significance of ribonucleic acid is doubtful, but they clearly enjoyed seeing people doing funny dance moves and wearing giant foam blobs on their heads and getting (unintentionally) tangled up in a rhythmic gymnastic ribbon while pretending to be a double helix.
The zoetrope of the title is an early moving pictures device, a spinning cylinder with slits cut in it, appearing to animate the still images inside. Here, the dancers strike poses in rectangles of light, hopping between them in sequence, although the illusion doesn’t really work without a strobe light.
There’s always great attention to detail in Anderson’s works, especially in the costumes (by Simon Vincenzi) and the dancers point things out with long arrows they tip towards – say, someone’s hairy Neanderthal toes – inviting the audience to look closer. But Anderson doesn’t talk down to her audience, or succumb to cutesy storytelling. This is more like an absurdist cabaret, which may leave some young viewers baffled, but then the imaginative life of a six-year-old is often pure surrealism.
With its musical whirrs, clicks and glitches Zoetrope opens up a strange world, but the boy who admitted being “a little bit” scared, also thought the show was very funny. An amusingly offbeat creation from an artist as imaginative as ever.
• At Dance House, Cardiff, until 16 December. Then touring throughout 2024
