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★★★★★ I Made You a Mixtape doesn’t warm up or ease you in — it drops you straight into a full‑tilt 90s dorm blowout. The Triplex is a large room, and Response Theatre Company fills every inch of it with noise, colour and movement. The atmosphere is deliberately chaotic: loud music, bodies in motion, a kind of giddy, high‑energy buzz that feels like the last night before everyone goes their separate ways.
Nine female performers inhabit this imagined college dorm, and the show plays out like a final celebration before adulthood arrives and ruins the fun. They dance, they play games, they tease each other, and they throw themselves into a dance‑off that becomes the heartbeat of the piece. The choreography is genuinely impressive — fast, sharp, and relentless — and the two live musicians give the whole thing a driving pulse that keeps the energy high.
There’s no spoken word at all. Instead, the performers communicate through movement, gesture and rhythm. Occasionally a flip chart appears, offering short written glimpses into what each dancer is dealing with in her life. These little fragments act like diary entries or confessions, grounding the exuberance with hints of real emotional weight.
The Response Theatre Company is led by Christie Lee Manning and based in the UK. They promote and work with female performers to develop “the first Meisner‑based movement theatre practice.” In simple terms, that means the performers aren’t acting in a presentational way — they’re responding to each other truthfully, moment‑to‑moment, using movement instead of dialogue. It’s rooted in instinct, emotional honesty and real‑time reaction, so the choreography feels lived rather than performed.
If you’re someone who prefers quiet theatre, this won’t be your cup of tea. It’s loud, it’s fast, and it’s unapologetically physical. But if you enjoy watching dancers move at speed and don’t mind being swept up in a wave of high‑octane energy, it’s fifty minutes that leaves you buzzing.
Reviewed by Jacqueline Sharp
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