Namastey Trafalgar Square

Watching things that don't work is, I think, like adding the shadows to a picture, the contrast delineating more clearly the light areas, making the image as a whole emerge more clearly. You need the bad in order to understand the good - and the mechanics as a whole - a little more.

I was watching what had promised to be a 'Bollywood spectacular' at Trafalgar Square last Friday, part of the Trafalgar Square Festival and India Now. After abseiling painters had finished the giant mural, Les Passagers, a group of 'aerialists' (about whom I can not find any further information) performed a vertical bollywood-inspired dance piece across it.

Dancers suspended against a giant backdrop, in a huge open air arena, with great lights and music: it should have been - or could have been - fantastic. And yet somehow it just... underwhelmed.

The backdrop with its huge characters and swirling colours detracted from the dancers - they were almost camouflaged at times; tiny creatures hard to make out, and their movements even more so.

After some intial confusing disparate action, things started to look up with some coordinated movements and twirling umbrellas, and then large sweeping runs across the mural. And still, and still... I could kind of sense what it should be, but felt it never quite got there.

The sad thing is, I'm sure it was incredibly hard work and the cumulation of a huge amount of effort and thought and skill. And up close the movements may have been beautiful.

But when you're working on a big scale, the picture is not the dancer, or the sum of all the dancers' individual movements; it's the whole thing - all the components are painting the whole picture. So the backdrop and the lighting and the space and the patterns need to be worked to advantage; worked to work.

If they had been on a plain coloured background; if the lighting had played up shadows so the sweeps and the turns, the flicks and the falls and gestures could be seen at the back of the square instead of only by the front row (who would also be able to see all the illusion-ruining harnesses and ropes); if the backdrop had been used a bit more like a giant clean sheet of paper, instead of just a stage tilted 90 degrees; if the fun effects - confetti and streaming silk ribbons and props - had been used to their most dramatic effect, then perhaps it really would have been spectacular.

Trafalgar Square Festival - http://www.london.gov.uk/trafalgarsquare/events/tsf/week3.jsp
India Now - http://www.visitlondon.com/events/special/india-now
Picture of Namastey Trafalgar Square on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/99104042@N00/sets/72157601567252269/