H3 by Bruno Beltrao at Sadler’s Wells
Oh boy… how do I do this… Ok Bruno Beltrao is a choreographer from Brazil and he mixes contemporary with hip hop stlyes. H3 had 9 dancers from his company Grupo de Rua (Niterio, Rio de Janeiro). So far so good. As for the performance… through out I was stressing on how am I gonna be able to explain this?!?! In the start I thought to myself… this is not dance and there is no music. There was movement and there was sounds. Started out with a couple of the dancers all sorts of spasmodic moves. Gradually more and more dancers would emerge from the darkens of the backstage to the lit up stage-front. What were they doing? Is this a choreographer for dance or fight sequences? What were they expressing… so many questions till one point I’m like stop analyzing it and just watch. It was like they were having spastic fights and running around. Or as Viv mentioned… like kids messing around. Someone else mentioned schizophrenic. Oh yes very much so. One minute they’re Krumping and popping so intensely and throwing each other around. It definitely had the attitude of krumping and lots of parkour modified for a plain environment. Another they’re walking backwards with their heads stretched way back… or they’re just sitting still! The throwing each other around was great coz they’d charge at each other and then grab each other and throw or pull each other using that momentum to bust another fly move. The main bits were the walking back with the head way back, floorspins and… best for last… running backward. When they all did the running backward it was like they were being rewound… as Viv has mentioned earlier. Ok so you’ve got the vague idea of the performance. As for the stage… it was plain… nothing special apart from switchboards on the side. Normal lighting was not used. Sometimes only stage-front or left or this guy walking around wheeling the lights around and when he’d fade them, the matrix of tube lights above would blink on, blink off. As for the sounds… it didn’t even start with any sounds apart from the dancers huffs and sneaker screeches on the black mirrored stage. Later there was electronic bleeps and other weird sounds… and finally there was real music which included samples from the dancers’ shoes. And what bass it had! This is the closest I can come to describing it. Weird moves, lights and sounds slowly building up to intense expressions and throbbing music with lots of WTF moments. Even the kids in the audience were totally silent. Although the dancers are pros with lots of practice and agility… it still amazes you at what the body is capable of with just a bit of physics. Big up Viv for the ticks.
Strapline – “Understand the jargon of the financial world: a simple guide to the way money works”. Simple?!!!??!?!? Well I guess you could call it that but he sure does go into each and everything with a magnifying glass and almost everything he reveals has a history, which he shares in detail. And also helps understand things better. At the end of every chapter he also has Internet Pointers with websites to view the right pages. Then at the end of the book he’s also got more websites and not to forget the kinda jargon you could come across and what it really means. Dude goes into the following subjects by chapter.
The title made me think the subject may be stuff other than business. Well… it’s all about business! Most of the stuff I’d been trying to hint to my old company. The most important, I think, is the systems. Once you have a good system in place you don’t even need intelligent people to do anything… JUST FOLLOW THE SYSTEM! That’s how most of these franchises are raking it in innit. This book comes very close to being a bible for business. Some things will be things you know or obvious, while others will make you wonder why you didn’t see it like that before. All put together in simple comprehensive text with examples when it gets complex. Now the contents may make the book seem huge but it’s not, the contents had subcontents too.