Barbican, week two

Six days later, now in better physical shape and newly recharged by a quick trip to Berlin, I went back to Barbican with M for another pre-show dinner at the Riverside cafe. As with last week, I now noticed the 'other audience' roaming in the foyer - a lot of them wearing exquisite pearls, quite a few elegantly pearl-clad, gingerly sipping their overpriced red wine. This was not 'our' crowd today as we were here to see Pied Piper and they, Parsifal (third act) in concert with Valery Gergiev. We recognise a few friends across the hall and wave to them. I point out to M a riotously-dressed woman in her 60s in scarlett-framed spectacles and her tall, younger companion who looked like an incredibly masculine gypsy. Vivienne Westwood and her Austrian husband, Andreas Kronthaler. Were they here for the hip hop or for Wagner? We managed to amuse ourselves for a full five minutes with the guessing game (the answer was the latter). The LSO concert, as always, started at 19:30 and our opera-loving friend looked on at us with great confusion, from the door across the foyer where he was just about to get in to the concert, as we were not making any attempt to gather ourselves and enter the hall: 'Are you not going in?!' 'No' - we shouted back - 'we're going to see hip hop dance instead.'

And what a show it was. The re-setting of the classic Pied Piper story in the nameless underbelly of contermporary metropolis plagued by ASBO youths was ingenious. The synopsis, divided cleverly into 'chapters', seemed to fit the thrilling choreography (which really favours and befits the episodic narrative as much as classical ballet does) while also making a nod to the medieval literary origin of the story. Kendrick Sandy, the Piper and godfather of the company, Boy Blue Entertainment, clearly inspires so much in his young apprentices and presides the action with unshakable authority. The most virtuosic parts were often left to the youngsters, though, who were capable of doing the jaw-dropping acts with such effortlessness that we cheered and shrieked as spontaneously as the young crowd around us (M had come straight from work in his City suit - for once we really stuck out in the sea of hip-hop audiences). The really breathtaking moments, though, came at the end with the Charming of the Kids scene. Onto the stage came bouncing a score of real kids - we're talking 6- to 10-year olds here - of such a wide range of ethnicity that their mere presence presented a portrait of contemporary Britain right there. And they all bounced and danced and swinged and then did all sorts of gravity-defying things with their limps and on their heads. A lot of 'awwww's emanated from every corner of the theatre. In the final act, 'The Piper's Training Camp' (here's Naughties East London's unique contribution to the tale), they were united with the rest of the cast in a show of disciplines as much as technical brilliance. Isn't this the real morale of this production? The programme states that Boy Blue Entertainment's aim is 'to encourage youth to embrace dance, while teaching them discipline and team building and exposing them to performance and storytelling'. The thought that this company, and this enraptured audience, happily spent the same evening alongside the Wagner die-hards who were just as emotionally moved by a completely different experience, filled me with joy. We might be walking out of a building in the heart of what is now officially a doomed industry, but arts will continue to transcend our otherwise mundane lives, and because of that, this city will never die.