This performance is made up of four pieces: three dance and one duologue. The first piece, Inside Story, is dark and emotional. I enjoyed it for itself, but couldn't see a link with Anne Frank upon whose ‘tormented’ life it is based, as Anne to me is remarkable precisely because of her vivacity and refusal to be overcome by difficult circumstances.

The second piece, Face Resistance is much more upbeat and invigorating to watch, and provides a nice contrast to the darkness of Inside Story. It reflects the struggle of sports women (and perhaps all sports people?) to reach, and stay, at the top.

The last two pieces, Ride to Freedom and Rosa look at Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person and sparked the civil rights movement. These two pieces dovetail nicely. Ride to Freedom was my favourite piece of dance out of the three. Not only did the props and the slides help situate the piece, I also felt the dancing really "came together" and where it had been good to watch before, now it was very good. It was followed by a duologue with two actresses, one playing Rosa Parks, the other as a narrator. This was a clear and interesting presentation of Rosa’s story and the events leading up to her refusal to give up her seat. The (white) actress’s black Southern drawl was a definite highlight.

I wonder if it would be better to place the duologue third as an introduction to Ride to Freedom to help the audience make sense of details of Rosa’s story, such as an episode involving a purse. It would also allow the performance to finish with the six dancers on stage, where they could be joined by the actresses to take a bow, something they curiously omitted to do.

Fiona Paterson