Dirt and Other Delicious Ingredients is a dance show from Java dance company and is part of the Capital E Festival for Children.
This is the poster blurb:
Deep in the dirt hide ingredients to build, bake and cultivate. Let your imagination run wild as a miraculous world unearths before your eyes. Three dancers mould dust into works of art, twigs into fences and rocks into everything under the sun.
There’s magic hidden in every crevice, you just need to dig deep!
I’m liking
This show had incredible atmosphere. Walking in to the smells of all the spices they had scattered on the stage was like walking into an Indian market.
There was some great percussion that had all the kids in the audience clapping along and grooving in their seats.
The show finished with a big food fight that involved the dancers smooshing ripe tomatoes into each others’ faces. Needless to say the small people in the audience found that hilarious.
Things that made me go hmmmm
Having read the description, I was quite surprised by what the show was actually like. Rather than turning dirt into various objects – they pulled them out from under piles of dirt. There was very little dialogue, so you had to work hard to figure out what was happening which was tricky at times.
The food fight was a strange ending. Most of the show seemed to treasure the things that had come from the dirt, so destroying food was quite a departure from that.
The conclusion
My 3 3/4 year old’s initial reaction was “wow, this is amazing!” However I think he was a bit young for the show as his attention wandered and he spent the rest of it asking why various things were happening. We would have loved the percussion sections to be longer and for there to be more audience participation. I would recommend it for school age children rather than preschoolers.
