Time for Fun

• Lucy Ribchester
• 7 August 2012

This article is from 2012.

Russian troupe prove handy when it comes to dance

It’s the hands rather than the feet that do the dancing in this original show from St Petersburg-based Hand Made Theatre. With nothing but rolled up sleeves, white gloves and a well-timed UV light to aid them, the ensemble create patterns, puppets and giant shapes to a soundtrack that shifts from Grieg’s Piano Concerto to Swan Lake to Flower of Scotland.

The show’s most successful sketches come either when they use their hands as puppets – a parody of the cygnet dance from Swan Lake is wonderfully done, starting with dinky dextrous fingers then reprised as a full-arm version – or when the UV light is on them, picking out their white disembodied gloves, making their arms float like an artist’s brush strokes from one image to the next. A Picasso-esque face melts into an opening flower, Nessie becomes a Highland dancer.

In these sections the effect of animation in action is so strong it’s easy to forget there are humans attached to the floating arms, let alone a whole team of them working in harmony.

Assembly Roxy, 623 3030, until 27 Aug (not 13 & 20), 2.30pm, £11 (£10).