Tapping on the tube. Photograph: Dan Chung
Dance is aiming shamelessly for the headlines at the moment with the second of London's Big Dance festivals. Last week the city's mayor Boris Johnson posed on Millennium Bridge to launch the event, flanked by Strictly Come Dancing stars Erin Boag and Bruno Tonioli plus a hilariously inclusive corps de ballet taken from Bollywood dancers, cheerleaders, jiving Lindy Hoppers and a group of same-sex ballroom and Latin dancers.
Over the coming week more of the city's dancers are being called on to generate yet more press by participating in the record-breaking activities dominating the festival. For example: performing the biggest ever Bollywood dance (more than 200 participants required); executing the largest number of football freestyle tricks in one minute; amassing the largest number of couples jiving simultaneously (556 couples required); getting more than 191 ballet dancers balancing on pointe for one minute, and achieving the largest number of streetdance moves in a minute.
It would take a curmudgeonly spirit to cavil at the fun of this and I especially love the sound of Aletta Collins' project for the climax of Big Dance which involves 2008 Londoners all learning a simple piece of Collins' own choreography, gathering in Trafalgar Square and attempting to break the world record for the largest number of people participating in one choreographed work.
Slightly below the radar there are of course lots of classes, workshops and performances going on through the week - some of them genuinely interesting. And there is a hope that Big Dance will take the city a few steps forward to becoming fitter, looser limbed, more physically expressive.
But I also wish London could organise itself into supporting more creation of actual dance works, actual repertory.
We've all talked about the current boom in dance. Audience numbers are increasing and the profession is thriving artistically. Yet this rise has originated from a pretty low base line and most companies and choreographers are still struggling financially. What does it say for the art form that one of the UK's biggest companies, English National Ballet can only afford to stage one mixed programme this year in amongst its box office staples of three-act classics.
Boris Johnson's interest in dance seems genuine. Last year his former constituency, Henley on Thames, had a dance festival fully planned and ready to run until it was scuppered by the summer floods. Perhaps now Boris can use his mayoral powers to cajole some extra funding for London's hardworking but underfunded dancers and choreographers.
