Cuba has one fairly old, fairly large modern-dance company, Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, founded in 1959, the year of the Revolution, and numbering thirty-odd dancers.
A workshop for 80-odd dancers features daily classes that include low-flying trapeze, upside-down movement, bungee and aerial hoop, fabric, pole and choreography.
5800 people in the audience watched as 20-odd singers, dancers and musicians focused their talents in the Art Deco auditorium.
Bussell even sheepishly admits to having taken the odd dance class recently so she still looks like a dancer when she appears on the show.
In another odd sequence, two dancers climb into supported poses around what looks like an orthopaedic chair.
All Day Long by Joanna Biggs (Serpent's Tail, £8.99) With empathy and energy, Joanna Biggs draws "a portrait of Britain at work" through interviews with 30-odd subjects: rabbi, dancer, crofter.
I don't mind duets in which they never look at each other, but it's odd to see dancers advancing without once looking ahead, solos in which nobody ever looks outward, ensembles in which everybody looks piously down as if saying prayers.
Those little odd moments where one dancer is noticeably and intentionally out of order, or the New York Times Alastair Macaulayy's pointing out some of the Soviet, Communist motifs, make me want to see it again, to look closer.
Once gimmicky-looking, the ballet and its odd props and disappearing dancers now feel just as sad and impudent and quirky as the Charles Ives score, whose soloists were Arturo Delmoni and Alan Moverman.
Eric Taub, the New York correspondent for ballet.co, an international online dance magazine, recently wrote: "Whelan is an acquired taste: extremely thin and muscular, with astonishingly long limbs, Whelan often strikes first-time viewers, especially those accustomed to more conventional dancers, as odd to the point of freakishness".
