This summer is all about the novelty dance event – site-specific, pop up, inclusive and outdoors – and getting the suspicious, unfit British public into a new relationship with their bodies. Boris Johnson wants three million Londoners dancing by the 2012 Olympics, and to inspire us he showed off his best Bollywood moves at the Palladium.
Johnson's terpsichorean debut marked the official launch of London's Big Dance week; the serious part of the programme kicked off with Counterpoint, a work created by Shobana Jeyasingh for the enormous courtyard of Somerset House.
Dance in open spaces can easily disappear, and when Jeyasingh's 20 women dancers line up for their first entrance, the extreme scale of the courtyard and its surrounding facades reduces them to near mere dots.
But Counterpoint is a piece of lovely, intelligent design and within its 10-minute span it spins a bewitching choreography around the possibilities of the space – not only using the courtyard as a stage but the 55 single jet fountains that play continuously among the dancers as they move.
Sections of the choreography echo the geometry of the architecture as the dancers are configured into lines and squares. When they come together in near mechanistic unison, Cassiel's score of textured beats and clanging bells places the dancers firmly in the heart of the city.
But other sections work a defiant contrast to the setting, as the saffron-costumed performers cling together in fluid, intimate shapes. Best of all are the fountains, which have been calibrated to add their own luminous design to the piece, sometimes shooting high and ecstatic between the dancers, sometimes bubbling gently near the ground. The performers get soaked, but the choreography never falters.
