A DANCE TRIBUTE TO PING PONG

This is an independent continuation of the peculiar symbiosis of sport and dance JSK developed in 1997 with A Dance Tribute to the Art of Football. This original idea, the first of its kind ever, has been a strange bird in the international dance fauna. With close to 500 shows in 23 countries and still running strong, a number of prizes, and an inmense press coverage, it’s still represents an academic dilemma – is it populistic entertainment or cutting edge contemporary dance? The paradox of the football show is that it was meant as a short lived happening with a shoestring budget and a hilariously short rehearsal time.

A Dance Tribute to Ping Pong has been on the sketch board for almost a decade, in search for the right moment where the company can be sure of sufficient time and resources to take the potential further. The new production maintains a fearless approach to popular culture references and represents the more pure dance style of the company. In addition, puppet theatre is particularly present this time, along with a voiceover in badly spoken English. The show’s storyboard have deliberate similarities to the average american B-film script – a team of bleach white youngsters are taught Eastern philosophy in record time and take ping pong to a transcendental level. The thematic greyzone is deliberately grey – bouncing between respectless blasphemy at worst and charming naiveness at best.