The first or last dance can be a tough slot, either due to a spectator’s weight of expectation or exhaustion. Consider Spring Forward 2018’s not-for-me grand finale, staged by choreographer and dancer Marco da Silva Ferreira as a would-be panorama of rhythmic sound, motion and colour for seven characterful, yellow-faced dancers in motley, carnivalesque street garb. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? And I ‘get’ the giddy, potentially appealing intoxication the performance might engender in viewers attuned to the game, gurning cast’s deliberately disjointed, even cock-eyed antics. They’re like a gang of exotic, eccentric cloud cuckoo land travelling players kept going by loud, propulsive ‘boom and blare’ music. To quote the website entry, ‘Will you manage to remain seated?’ Alas, I did, when what I really wanted was to escape from the collectively indulgent onslaught of busy but vapid, mirthlessly mechanical and ultimately maddening aural and kinetic repetition. It wasn’t loathsome, but I felt so locked in.