Unusual Places to Dance (Part One), Antonine Shopping Centre, Cumbernauld

Dance critic

Monday 18 June 2012

The elderly couple are in a world of their own, dancing cheek-to-cheek to music only they can hear; the headphones they're wearing make the soundscore a secret.

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Mary Brennan

Their memories, however, are more of an open book. As they dance, film footage and voiceovers evoke the heady ballroom days of yesteryear when Glasgow was the place for slow-slow-quick-quick-slow action and Cumbernauld – where the participants in this Tricky Hat project all live – was just a sketch on a planner's drawing board.

Working in tandem with Cace (Cumbernauld Action Care for the Elderly) the Tricky Hat team has been using ballroom dancing as a portal into the social history that is so valuably voiced in personal anecdotes and then beyond that, into the issues – feeling isolated, lonely, unwanted and unnecessary – that can leave the elderly feeling depressingly out of step with the birlin' world around them. Eventually, all this material will coalesce into a piece of professional theatre, a work-in-progress is scheduled for October/November 2102, the hope being that a full-scale touring production will emerge in spring 2013.In the meantime, shoppers milling about in the Antonine Centre were stopped in their tracks by this utterly engaging installation with its bon mots – "old creeps went to the Albert" being one – posted on the walls and its films where unseen voices spoke vividly of love found on the dancefloor. Meanwhile, the dancers seemed to shed years in a smiling partnership that epitomised the great Irving Berlin classic, Let's Face the Music and Dance. Fred and Ginger – no strangers to unusual places to dance – would have loved the location.HHH

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Unusual Places to Dance (Part One), Antonine Shopping Centre, Cumbernauld

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