The sun shone at the Greenwich and Docklands international festival on its opening weekend, and the bees were buzzing too. Artizani’s Bees! The Colony is a surreal, charmingly wacky installation, tended by beekeepers in protective clothing, which allows audiences to look inside several hives. Here you discover unexpected miniature worlds – perhaps a glimpse of space accompanied by music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a racetrack or a miniature cinema. It’s great fun, if not quite the bee’s knees.
Bees! is one of several commissions from Without Walls, which has done much to raise the quality of outdoor performing arts. We tend to think that Europe always does this sort of thing better than us, and with more of an acrobatic wow factor that is less evident in British work. But on the small scale, UK companies are delivering something different and distinctive, no less skilled but far more low-key, often wittily packaged.
Two more Without Walls commissions – Gandini Juggling’s 8 Songs and Stopgap Dance Company’s Bill and Bobby – both fall into this category of neatly assembled shows. The latter puts Lucy Bennett and David Toole together in a performance that recalls the stylish partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and which borrows from 1930s films with a magpie glee.
No less cleverly choreographed is Gandini Juggling’s 8 Songs, which is exactly what it says on the tin: a series of classic rock songs with juggling accompaniment, that ends with a clever send-up of the concept of silent discos.
The danger is that the sequences could be merely illustrative, but while there are moments that are, this is so much more. It’s a homage to the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, Bowie and others that explores transgression, the soundtracks of our lives and how hard it is sometimes to keep all the balls spinning to the beat.
• All shows at Hat Fair, Winchester, 3-5 July.
