AMATEUR DANCE REVIEW: Kat's Dance Academy Showcase - The Met Theatre, Bury.

This evening the students from Kat's Dance Academy in Heywood got the chance to strut their stuff on the main stage of Bury's Met Theatre.

Kat's Dance Academy takes pupils of all ages - including adults - and have classes in tap, ballet, contemporary, jazz, cheer, and even drama, although this evening was devoid of the final two disciplines. 

It is always a pleasure to watch young people "show off", and enjoy their time on stage. I always hark back to the days of my childhood, when such opportunities were simply not available. Children and youngsters really didn't have the chance to create and work together in private groups such as these back then (they didn't exist!); we had to join an adult group, which simply isn't the same. So today's children are indeed very lucky, and to give them the chance to build their confidence this way, learning many life skills along the way - whether they end up taking dance further into adulthood or not - is so important.

This evening we watched 20 routines (not including the finale which included the entire school!), and we went through the various age groups / ability groups / genres and styles in a hotchpotch order keeping us on our toes...! However I do believe that the evening would have run a lot smoother and appeared far more professional had the academy dispensed with the two MCs / announcers, not shown a couple of lengthy and unnecessary videos, and held the raffle half way through the second act. We had a programme with all the information in there, so an announcer was superfluous; both videos were also superfluous and seemed quite self-congratulatory, and surely the raffle prizes and winning numbers could have been on a table for us to view on our way out? All these things just served to lengthen the evening, make it more disjointed, and detract from the dancers and why they were there. 

Some of the dances were choreographed by the teaching staff and others by trainee dance teachers who dance with the senior group. I think my two favourite numbers from the evening were "Over And Over" and "Be Still". However, I do have a couple of suggestions which might help in future showcases, if I may be so bold. First, the stage at The Met doesn't have any side wings on Stage Left and so all the dancers needed to enter and exit from one side. It would therefore have been more visually pleasing (and shorter) if the dancers had entered the stage in order (from furthest away first). Second, in general the music being played was far too loud, hurting our eardrums! However, this was especially true for the tap dances; where the whole point of a tap dance is for us to be able to hear the taps, which, due to the music being so loud were drowned out unfortunately. There was even one tap routine which had a tap dance on the playback backing track being used, and the tap dance on stage didn't follow these beats! I might also perhaps say that when one of the older dancers or teachers stood on stage with the younger ones and danced the routine with them, this worked much better and one could see immediately the difference this made by the amount of confidence it gave the younger groups; dancing in the wings unseen didn't seem to help in the slightest, and kneeling down at the front of the stage with flailing arms for one dance also had little effect, and looked, from an audience point of view, very silly. 

However, none of the above diminshes the hard work, commitment, and ability of the dancers, and it was, afterall, their showcase. For some of the younger ones, it would have been their first time performing on a stage, and so they need as much encouragement as possible. 

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 11.6.22