Stu Richards is a poet, dancer and stand-up comedian. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, he’s managed to combine all three of these elements. So what is LaughDance: The Experiment? If it sounds ridiculous to you, check out the YouTube clip, it’s also hilarious. Stu Explains.
Darcey Bussel and Ashley Banjo performing improvised street/ballet fusion to a Chris Rock routine outlining the disparity between subsets of a particular racial group. Or Jim Davidson with b-boys. Either works.
“Three comedians, four dancers; one ground-breaking experiment. It’s stand-up comedy set to dance. Have you ever seen a one-liner set to breakdance? Satire set to salsa? A routine about one man’s addiction to Calpol doled out via the medium of interpretive dance?
“Three different comedians will each have their routines interpreted by a professional dance crew, Joon Dance, and our world class choreographer.
“We’d say it’s avant-garde, but we’re not dicks.”
Why did you choose to perform as part of Freestival?
“No extreme, soul-sapping commercialisation, no communist diktats: just smart, helpful, comedy-loving folks enabling us lot go up there and dick about for a few weeks with our gratuitously experimental concept shows. It’s how things should be.”
For you, is Stand-Up Comedy a career choice or a calling – and why?
“It’s a way for me to legitimise moonwalking in front of an audience as a career path.”
Have you ever gone too far? What happened?
“Each show we take a couple in the audience and interpret their love story: I narrate as our dancers perform an improvised routine. In our second show this happened to be a pair on a first date. Either they never saw each other again, or, as I prefer to imagine, it brought them closer together and they now have a little baby LaughDance.”
If you were curating a stand up show for television, who would be your guests?
“Darcey Bussel and Ashley Banjo performing improvised street/ballet fusion to a Chris Rock routine outlining the disparity between subsets of a particular racial group. Or Jim Davidson with b-boys. Either works.”
Broadway Baby Listing and Edinburgh Fringe Box Office: http://www.broadwaybaby.com/shows/laughdance-the-experiment/702003
Website: www.laughdance.co.uk and www.sturichardscomedy.com
Twitter: @laughdanceuk @sturcomedy @joondance
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Laughdance/466323020157429?fref=ts
YouTube Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTXQp3lNrzU
