Bluffing Your Way in Ballet @ theSpace

As an artform, ballet may be simply understood as a theatrical and graceful execution of dance and narrative. As a study and career, however, it notoriously demands rigorous discipline from dancers and is traditionally more technical than loose.

Bluffing Your Way in Ballet is a delightful show that explores the historical contexts of ballet through light-hearted adaptations of popular numbers, comical storytelling devices, and the portrayal of multiple personas whose contributions serve as informational insights into lives that have led and been led by ballet.

The piece, led by nationally and internationally experienced ballerina Alexandra Pickford, pays tribute to the lightness that ballet asks us to embrace, alongside the sacrifice associated with it. Pickford generously passes down the knowledge gained from her experiences in a way that delights. The piece allows for an opportunity to perceive the art as one which need not be taken seriously all of the time. What better way to entertainingly narrate history than through humour?

The experience is a simultaneously relaxing and educational escape from the busy and action-packed Edinburgh Fringe, which hustles and bustles outside of these walls painted with frivolous romance and humour. A range of actors constitute the show. Each actor offers a unique charm to the performance, and they all assume various historical identities. All the while, they maintain the joyful yet dramatic essence with which the piece admires both the comedy and tragedy that accompany ballet history.

What is so fantastic about this show is the harmony produced by the actors’ exaggerated enactments of the cheeky workings behind the scenes of professional ballet. Natural chemistry flows through the room, puts the audience at ease and entertains them through a digestible display of the connections between prominent performers and their contexts.  

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Bluffing Your Way in Ballet, theSpace @ Venue 45, run ended