Dance Better At Parties

Emerging from writer/director Gideon Obarzanek's research into men's experience with dance for a documentary, this dance/theatre hybrid follows middle-aged and mumbling David through a series of dance lessons with the younger and significantly more sociable dance instructor Rachel. Dave (Steve Rodgers) lives life in a bubble, Rachel (Elizabeth Nabben) is bubbly. Renée Mulder's wonderful design and wardrobe full of costumes add more and more layers to the worlds-apart characters.

Both Nabben and Rodgers perform incredibly as actors and dancers. Nabben achieves a mesmerising fluidity with her movement, and Rodgers does a stunning job of accurately depicting each stage of his character's ten-lesson progression as a dancer into the 70-minute show. A perfectly ill-defined manner of interaction is struck between the two, creating and maintaining throughout a strange tension as the exact nature of their relationship and its different facets – especially in the face of money exchanging hands – never finds clarity for the audience or the characters.

It is from this that most of the drama emerges – David's traumatic back story more affecting in the brief panicked flashbacks that interrupt throughout, and not the scripted retelling that is eventually revealed – and while the confused chemistry between the two is brilliantly shown it is let down by the script. The balance between dance and dialogue sequences feels too heavily weighted towards the former, and the dialogue that is there seems secondary, not in its performance, but in its composition.

Sydney Theatre Company to Saturday 11 May