Samara Show 2011 - Review

The following review appeared in various local newspapers following the 2011 performances:

'Showtime!' by David Learner, 30th January 2011

"Take 300 dancers, 800 costumes, 8 months’ rehearsal and one astonishing creator and the result is Showtime! Once every three years Samara’s spectacular feast of dance for the eyes and ears trips the life fantastic in a thousand different ways.

Michelle Rasdall created the Samara Ballet School back in 1993 for children of all ages in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk; some of its original members are still there, eighteen years later. They arrive as two-year-old bunnies or bees or butterflies and Michelle painstakingly moulds them into mature dancers offering self-confidence, style and high spirits. That’s what works: no-one on the stage of the BVC over those three tidal performances was there because they had to be. They danced for the love of it and for the pleasure of friends and families who supported them every tap of the way.

The show embraces so many disciplines - tap, contemporary, jazz and classical - and Michelle’s pupils star at every turn. Offer half a dozen dancers swirling blue net and they become the sea; pyjamas for a sleep over sequence are wonderfully upstaged by clockwork toys as they come alive well past the children’s bedtime; a very reluctant milkmaid and her bucket hypnotised us into thinking there really was a cow on stage. Visually it’s just a back wall; imaginatively, it’s an English country garden, or a pirate ship, or a picnic. The effect is stunning.

Disbelief is suspended by sheer imagination. A startling and beautiful sequence from Hayley Rasdall watches a young maid on board the Titanic, dreaming of love as she swirls around her mistress’s cabin. But the jolt of ice is real and the feeling of suffocating panic as the waters begin to cover the girl’s dreams brings tears to the eyes. A wonderful and exhilarating performance.

Sierra Humbert dances as the fisherman’s wife as she waits for her husband to return. The story is so effectively told that once again you can almost see the quay or hear the gulls or sense the sea. And Season of Love, danced by the more senior girls, is a celebration of life and love and the need to shine.

This is an evening of love that leaves you breathless. So much time and energy is offered for free for a handful of performances to a few hundred lucky people once every few years, but its ricochet effect is felt by us all. Long may Samara continue. The spirit of dance finds each and every one of us, in our hearts, and leaves us happy to be alive and in the presence of brilliance."