Dance Centre Kenya brilliantly pulls off romantic musical

Members of the cast for Dance Centre Kenya’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gala night, at Kenya National Theatre on February 10, 2023. PHOTO | POOL

Gala Night at Mid-Summer Night’s Dream was an enchanting affair filled with fantasy and an abundance of fairies, nymphs and ethereal creatures who carried magic on their wings.

Dance Centre Kenya (DCK) once again brought this much-loved ballet classic back to the Kenya National Theatre stage this past weekend.

Staged just in time for Valentine’s Day, when love and romance is in the air, Shakespeare’s wonderful spoof on romantic love was transformed into a marvellous musical composition in 1826 by Felix Mendelssohn and then choreographed as a magical two-act ballet by George Balanchine in 1967.

As DCK’s founder, choreographer, and artistic director, Cooper Rust introduced the Gala Night, she spoke of passing down the baton of wisdom and experience, as she had been given when the American choreographer Ann Brodie bequeathed her interpretation of the dance to Cooper when she was her student in the US a few years back.

This was to prepare us for an amazing production with youth playing challenging parts on the toe and dressed in elegant attire perfectly suited for each enchanting scene.

The most majestically dressed was George Okoth, (an elder at age 18) playing Oberon, King of the Fairies contrasting his most playful and naughty fairy, Puck, (Ephraim Kimani, 14) and his elegant and graceful Queen Titania (Flora Liu, 16) on whom Puck sprinkled a secret love potion that had hilarious consequences.

But that’s an aside. The anticipated event of the Dream is the wedding of Duke Theseus to his bride Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.

And while the Duke is preparing for his wedding, he is also lining up his daughter Hermia to marry his chosen Demetrius.

Here is where the drama and hilarity begin because Hermia doesn’t want Demetrius and he is also in love with another woman.

But the Duke is adamant. So what are the youth supposed to do? Flee, of course.

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That is how Hermia and her sweetheart Lysander end up in the enchanted forest. They want to escape the Duke’s jurisdiction and elope. But there’s another young woman involved.

Helena has the hots for Demetrius but knows, once her dear friend Hermia discloses her secret plan to flee, that all hell will break out.

So, for some peculiar reason, she sounds the alarm to Demetrius. And he in turns dashes off to the woods as well, with her chasing after her man.

If it sounds a little chaotic and twisted, the story is nonetheless well told through the dancers’ body language. But where the situation spins out of control is when King Oberon decides to play the trickster and obtains his love potion.

With just a few dabbles on the eyelids, a sleeper falls in love with the first one they see once they wake.

Naturally, Oberon’s messenger Puck gets his instructions wrong from the King. He sprinkles the potion not on Demetrius, who he is meant to do, but on Lysander, leading to complications galore.

It seems that Helena had earned Oberon’s sympathies. He had instructed Puck to drop the potion of the eyes of Demetrius so Helena could time things to be right there when he woke up.

But Puck goofed. Instead of Demetrius falling for her, it’s Lysander who does. Oops! Now what?

What makes matters worse but more fun is when Oberon wants to trick his beloved Titania, so he sends Puck to splash drops of the love potion on her eyelids as she sleeps. (You can imagine there are lots of sleepers in the Dream.)

Anyway, Puck has already had some fun with the ‘rustic’ peasant Nick Bottom (Alex Stow, 15) who Puck somehow transformed into a donkey and the first living being that Titania sees once she awakens.

Fortunately, Oberon sees what a mess his messenger has made and what folly has ensued from his prank which backfired.

So he sends Puck back to reset the whole scene so that each lover finds their true love and the wedding of all three couples including Hermia and Lysander and Helena and Demetrius can proceed.

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It’s a complicated story but a delicious one that blends the sublime music of Mendelssohn with the colourful magic forest backdrop conceived and created by Nathalie Fusillo who even constructed the lush green tree that Puck often perched on as he oversees his deeds and is meant to be invisible which the tree allowed him to almost be.

Many thanks to Cooper Rust for training all of these marvellous dancers, many of whom are already on their way toward professional careers in dance.

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