Penguin Cafe

Mr Gnome, ever receptive to quirky individuality, is a longtime fan of the upbeat, sprightly syncopations of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

The orchestra's composer and presiding genius Simon Jeffes died in 1997, but his legacy lives on through recordings and ongoing live performances.

Back in the 1980s Jeffes created a suite of music for the ballet Still Life at the Penguin Cafe, which remains in the repertoire of the splendid Birmingham Royal Ballet.

To describe the piece one is obliged to mention that along with penguin waiters, a menagerie of creatures dance their way across the stage: mountain sheep, a bug, a kangaroo rat, a zebra ....

Sounds twee?

It's not.

By turns funny and touching, the dances created for these engaging creatures (by choreographer David Bintley) celebrate the beauty, strength and vulnerability of the animal kingdom - and hint at the threat posed to all of them by human mismanagement of the world's resources.

The match between music and movement is, for me, pitch-perfect - intoxicating.

And perhaps its no surprise that a voiceless art can so successfully speak up for our voiceless fellow residents of Planet Earth.

Hit and myth

Today, a semi-accidental visit to the ballet, a kulcha classification to which I've come late.

This afternoon's performance by the tip-top Birmingham Royal Ballet was Sylvia, a three-act confection of soft-boiled mythological mayhem, featuring nymphs, a goddess, a middle-aged cupid and a shipload of pirates (cue solo for one-legged pirate chief).

Deep, it isn't.

But dance theatre has grown on me in recent years. I find myself increasingly willing to surrender to the possibilities that open up when you leave those pesky words behind.

At one level, the conventions of classical dance are downright daft - prance, pose, pirouette.

But then along come those moments when the 'ballet thing' happens, when I can't tell if the dancers are expressing the music, or if the music is expressing the dance.

And I forget to breathe.