Greenwich Dance's Christmas Cabaret was fun. The enormous 1930's hall was filled with tables and chairs, and lights and the bar was serving drinks direct to your seats. People dressed up. Children sprung around dancing to the brilliant house band The Ciyo Brown World Trio. There was time to chat, and drink and eat our way through the enormous pile of food we had brought with us for our friday night picnic. The quality of the performance was pretty variable, but that fits in with my idea of a traditional variety night. Some stuff was great, some stuff was almost great, and some of it was really not to my taste, or just bad… But it didn't really matter because nothing lasted too long.

In the great camp was The Paper Cinema. If you ever get a chance to see them then you should. They make live cinema using carefully drawn puppets and scenes moved in front of a camera that projects the action onto a big screen. The puppeteers work in full view of the audience and are accompanied by a musician, so you can flick your attention between the screen and the tricks that make the film happen . The tale was King Pest, and based on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. It was slightly confusing to follow, but the magic of seeing these little paper cut-outs seemingly come to life, creates an atmosphere of it's own that makes the narrative seem less important. 

Antonia Grove's two sketches are also worth a mention. Antonia Grove, previously one half of Probe, has been working with Wendy Houston to create these duets for herself and musician Scott Smith. She presented us with a different performance persona each time, playing with a iconic American images, singing, speaking and dancing into the microphone. There was definitely something interesting there,  a little bit of frission that kept me intrigued. I like them, yet there was some indefinable quality to them that made it feel as though they hadn't quite got to where they wanted to be yet.

Avant Garde Dance is a youth company that performs contemporary dance influenced hip-hop. I tend to be a bit suspicious about fusions in dance, but this worked: the piece was sharp and performed with passion and skill. Syncop8 is a new company dedicated to jazz dance from the era when it was still an art form embedded in jazz music, and other American dance and music forms with African routes such as Lindy Hop and Charleston.  I share a love for this kind of jazz. There was some good dancing and they made the link between the history of the dance forms really clear, but it still felt like it was missing the mark somehow. In contrast, I can't say that Cody's Moving Group weren't really going for and probably hitting the affect they wanted, but it still made me cringe. Two men in long dark trousers and naked torsos performing amazing no-handed super-flips, while a group of attractive young women in flesh coloured under-wear demonstrated their "primitive and instinctual" side by wrestling each other, crawling across the stage and flicking their hair to Metallica. Now I definitely think that not enough dance pieces use Metal music, but why did this "primitive" burst of energy have to share so much of it's aesthetic with a 60's B-movie…? I'm not saying that it isn't a great look, if only it was a little more self-aware and a little less wet-dream. But hey, maybe I am overly reactionary.  Everyone else seemed to like it. A woman in front of me screamed a little and clung to her partner every time the male dancer did one of his gravity defying flips. And the little girl in front of us first tried to climb on her mum to see better and then pushed her way through until she was practically under the women's feet. Oh well.

To finish the evening with a Christmassy theme, same-sex ballroom dancing champions the Sugar Dandies took to the floor to perform a Santa and Rudolph routine. They out-shone the previous Tango dancing couple David Outevski and Bianca Vrcan, for both charisma and dancing skills and opened the floor for the party. The Ciyo Brown World Trio came back on for some more music and were followed up by some Beyonce and Michael Jackson. The whole Christmas family vibe turns into a wedding reception party, if at a wedding you didn't have to worry about what shoes you were wearing or buy an expensive gift. There were elderly men in red-waistcoats first up on the dance floor, extrovert children, and women dancing in flouncey dresses with their shoes off and lots of singing along to the music. Seen in this new light, even the compering and poetry from Elvis McGonagall seemed to fill the role of bad-joke telling uncle who watches  a lot of TV (I tried to explain the long reel of pop-culture TV references to my non-British 'plus one': "I thought it was just a long list of random words…").

A bottle of wine, the permission to eat and to chat and the general unpretentious glamour of the GDA hall made this evening a good one. I wouldn't necessarily choose to see all that many of the acts on their own, but The Christmas Cabaret was more than the sum of its parts.