Lea Anderson has spot-on timing. As the economic news goes from bad to bleak to bail-out, and financial chicanery is piled on regulatory mismanagement, the British dance maker, or choreographic satirist as she might more accurately be known, comes along with a darkly comic show that opens with the line "Save us from this farce".
The audience roared in bitter recognition, as the 70-minute cabaret wound its way around intentionally terrible rhymes to create an irony so intense it doubled back on itself and became serious again.
I don’t think Dancing On Your Grave is about the credit crunch, but it has the same spare-us-your-bleating take on death that we now have toward bankers. It features the wonderfully macabre minstrels Steve Blake and Nigel Burch, and three dancers — a single member from Anderson’s all-male Featherstonehaughs (Ryen Perkins-Gangnes) and two from her all-female Cholmondeleys (Valentina Formenti and Maho Ihara). Blake and Burch led the singing with their ukuleles, while Formenti, Ihara and Perkins-Gangnes moved in what you’d call a death-dance of music hall drollery.
The effect is a comic grotesquerie of death and how to stare it down. An excellent antidote to the current gloom.
Until 22 February (020 8237 1111, www.riversidestudios.co.uk).
The Cholmondeleys & The Featherstonehaughs: Dancing On Your Grave
Riverside Studios
Crisp Road, Hammersmith, W6 9RL
