Wedding celebrations have a long history in the annals of dance – from the Russian Imperial splendors of the last act of The Sleeping Beauty to the Kiwi vernacular of the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s The Wedding in 2006.  

Rebound Dance Company’s latest production, Someone Say “I Do”, carries on this tradition with its humorous take on the great Kiwi wedding.  This is not, however, a conventional dance performance, as it is spread across various venues within Ferrymead Heritage Park.  Audience and performers mingle from the start, as everyone gathers for the tram ride to the church.  Classic wedding behaviour is immediately in evidence; the wedding planner shepherds the guests/audience with relentless efficiency; the uncertain bride first panics, then resorts to extreme measures to reach the church on time.  

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Rebound Dance Company is made up of experienced dance professionals, ‘proper grownups’ all. In the site-specific collaborative work “I Do”, created under the artistic direction of Fleur de Thier and Andrew Shepherd, the ensemble of 16 performers present an array of delightfully comic wedding party  stereotypes: the baffled groom, the stentorian wedding planner, the jocular MC, the marvellously draggy wedding singer, the playboy best man, various opinionated parents and family friends, a set of gatecrashers, and a gaggle of bridesmaids in horrendous peach and coral scalloped frocks, who realise that they’ve each been taken in by the best man’s charms (and the backseat of his Toyota Corolla).

We in the audience play the part of wedding guests, and we participate in the hectic pre-wedding transportation and the calamitous service before being entertained, fed and sat down for the wedding dance and the drunken outcome of the disastrous evening.

For one of my companions, who’s been in dance classes since she could walk, it’s a delightfully freeing evening watching highly skilled teachers, choreographers and practitioners with decades’ worth of experience having fun in their spare time, in some places playing the part of gawkish non-dancers dancing – a case of goofing off with intent. I love seeing a variety of body types and ages moving freely with purpose and determination; take that, kids. It’s quite subversive, and it makes me reflect on the sort of bodies that we become accustomed to seeing perform and on display, and the taken-for-granted attitudes towards age and gender that are often embedded in particular modes of performance.

This is a very entertaining and endearing show, and it’s thoughtfully designed and conceptualised, but there are some structural and site-specific challenges. The complicated and modular construction of the action, which has us moving about different sites at the charming Edwardian Ferrymead Heritage Park by tram and by foot, means that in places it is difficult to maintain a sense of momentum between acts.

This is particularly the case when we split up and move through three short pieces – an outdoor group piece by a posse of bolting and desperate brides, a hang-dog solo from the caddish best man, and a beautifully kitsch wedding film – cascading hearts! Vaseline lens! – that introduces us to the characters. Each standalone piece works well, offering both an advancement of the narrative and a sense of comic tone, but the time it takes to move from place to place and the split focus this engenders means that this middle section of the show feels quite long.

The dramatic interludes work best when there’s a degree of improvisation and sense of barely contained anarchy, such as when we are being bundled onto the tram at the beginning and the wedding party – some of whom have been pre-loading – start to realise that the bride’s got a serious and quite dramatic case of cold feet. In comparison, I find the choice to offer some didactic narration as we move about the space a bit redundant; it forces the characters out of the moment and into a more distanced expository mode that undermines some of the spontaneity and interactivity present in other sections.

It’s a credit to the performers that these structural issues don’t impact upon the sense of playfulness that they work hard to cultivate. This show is noisy and fun and warm and wonderfully silly, and many of the ‘guests’ are bellowing out their thanks and well-wishes as we leave. (I can hear someone who was clearly in the BYO crowd hollering “this is the best thing I’ve been to!” as I’m faffing about in the carpark.) Like dinner theatre, this is best enjoyed with a group, some wine and a sober driver, but unlike dinner theatre – which I tend to find a bit gauche and haphazard – this has a sense of wit, verve and intent that makes for a highly satisfying evening out.

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