Any doubts over Ali Bastian's role in Burn the Floor are quashed by surveying the audience at last Saturday's matinee. Mums, dads, kids, grannies and grandads, visiting central London for the afternoon, then back home on the afternoon train. Some, no doubt, grew up in a ballroom dancing tradition, others are learning to dance now; many more, like myself, have come to know it through watching Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday nights.
Without the presence of Ali and her partner Brian Fortuna - the English rose and the American professional dancer who fell in love as they danced the perfect Viennese Waltz on last year's Strictly - I doubt whether half these people would have made the trip. But they have. They have paid their money and perched their bums on the seats of the Shaftesbury Theatre on this Saturday afternoon. The Burn the Floor creative team chose their star draws wisely for the London leg of this show which has been touring the globe since 1999.
The tagline of Burn the Floor is Ballroom Reinvented - and so it has been. The show takes the international style of the ten dances - five ballroom and five Latin - and spins them into fast-moving group events, mixing up the moves and chucking in some stunning physical feats. Limbs entwine themselves, heads spin inches off the floor, legs bicycle through the air, perfectly muscled and waxed torsos shine, and sweat arcs across the stage from the leaping bodies. In between there is still place for some quiet elegance and touches of romance.
Each dance carries its own short story. In 'Fishes', Sacha Farber is a flirty young man who gets in trouble for having too many girlfriends. In a samba, Karen Hauer is surrounded by semi-naked men who vie for her attention - she then proceeds to dance blindfold, perhaps to protect her eyes from their glistening chests - and decides not to have any of them. Damon Sugden and Rebecca Sugden perform a beautiful waltz accompanied by a lone violin: star-crossed lovers maybe, dancing their last dance and creating a haunting stillness in the theatre.
The sheer physical energy is stunning, maintained by regular changes of personnel and choreography while touring to keep bodies and creativity fresh. Jason Gilkison, the show's choreographer, was in the theatre keeping an eye on the action on stage. The cast is simply outstanding - professional dancers at the peak of their ability, many of whom have served time on various international versions of Strictly.
Some moments left me gasping - one dance closed with a dancer turning in a hold as if her legs were the hands of a clock, hitting the hour just as a bell chimed. Another ends with a dancer spinning around on the stage floor - stopping dead on the beat.
There is humour too, with Sacha's cheeky chappy act and his dive to the floor just as the final curtain fell. Some may have been inadvertent - the afternoon audience tittered as a male dancer reprised John Sergeant's 'sack of potatoes' move in the Paso - I'm not sure that this was quite the intention. The show was perhaps tighter in the evening performance (OK, I admit, I went to that too), although that might have been because I was sitting closer to the stage.
The first half had perhaps too many fast group dances - they mostly seemed to be set in a bar - but the ebb and flow of the second half works better: a wonderful rumba by Sarah Hives and Jeremy Garner stands out - two lovers twist and turn to Burn for You. The seemingly impossible hold Sarah achieves by hooking her leg around Jeremy's thigh and stretching herself horizontally behind his back won deserved applause at both performances. These two diminutive dancers really stood out for me - they might be mini but they pack a mighty amount of star quality.
Also outstanding were the musicians - notably singers Ricky Rojas and Rebecca Tapia, whose vocal power is simply breathtaking. Ruth Lorenzo, a former X-Factor contestant, was the guest singer and did surprisingly well - a West End musical career beckons, I suspect. Congratulations also to the stage production and lighting teams - usually unsung heroes - for their skilful work in such a fast-moving show.
Disappointingly, Ali and Brian appear only fleetingly - they skip across the stage in the second dance to a waltz and are gone in a couple of minutes. They then appear in a rumba and the group dance - Dirty Boogie - that closes the first half. The second half sees them waltz again and join the final group numbers. But the audience loves them - just their appearance on stage leads to a burst of applause.
I can understand that there are limitations on what Ali can do as the only non-professional in the show but surely she could have been given a full dance to perform - she did two during the Strictly celebrity tour plus group dances. In one of their waltzes, Ali and Brian dance across the stage and then exit - and the dance is finished by another couple. Why? In their rumba, they are on stage twice but for no more than a couple of minutes total. Why? What they did was lovely - the rumba was romantic and heartfelt - and there were plenty of 'awww' moments for their fans. In the group numbers, Ali threw herself into the action with huge infectious enthusiasm, more than holding her own with the professional dancers.
But the real heartbreaker is how little dancing Brian does. During the Dirty Boogie, he and Ali join the other dances in a rollocking group dance but then leave the stage half way through. I felt like standing up and shouting - don't go! Luckily they return after a couple of minutes. Brian takes his place at the front of stage - and simply outclasses every other performer around him, giving a tantalising glimpse of what might have been if he had been given a larger role.
Perhaps time constraints - it was less than a week between the Strictly professional tour ending and Burn the Floor opening - that prevented this. But Strictly's loss is clearly Burn the Floor's gain - the creative energy and freedom to play with traditional styles clearly suit Mr Fortuna more than the restrictions and petty humiliations that go along with employment at Britain's state broadcaster. I would not be surprised if he continues to work with the Burn the Floor team, hopefully when it tours the UK next year, as has been rumoured.
Burn the Floor creates a vibrant and entertaining montage of dances that show just how flexible and creative dance can be - it gets its audiences' feet tapping and their hearts lurching. But what was frustrating was the lack of a linking narrative to hold all these stories together. Just as you have been pulled into a scene, it ends, leaving you thinking, now is this connected to the bit we just saw, or is it something different, where are we going now? It would be interesting to see how much further the creative team could go. In opera and ballet, well-worn storylines have been reworked for modern times, taking the genres to new levels - Rome & Juliet retold in 1950s New York in West Side Story, Swan Lake rewritten for an all-male cast by Matthew Bourne. Could this be the next step for ballroom?
Brian officially launched his first two Brian's Beginners DVDs today on Channel Five. They are part of a series of DVDs he plans to choreograph to help people learn to dance.
