Resolution! The Place, London

Hits, misses and chocolate kisses

Getting started as a choreographer is a conundrum akin to high-board diving. To acquire the skills, you must put yourself through it, but to do that, and not to fall flat on your face, requires skill.

Enter Resolution!, the annual launch pad set up by The Place. Anyone can apply, and this year no fewer than 78 choreographic hopefuls will present work at a rate of three, four or five a night over the next six weeks. While tickets are cheap, it can be a gamble. Typically, Friday's opening night turned up a mix of the worthy, the quirky and the crashingly inept.

Lexi Bradburn's Scratched aimed for comedy and missed by a mile. A voice told us we were back-stage at some kind of variety show. One of the chorus line has failed to show so a stage hand is hauled in to fill the gap, though the routines are already so ragged that the disruption hardly registers. A man dressed for the office, bafflingly, taps out exotic tunes on a steel pan while women tap-dance, badly.

The polish in Holly Noble's FAWN was welcome. This was an ambitiously large-scale, neo-classical response to parts of the Mozart Requiem, yet it wasn't really a response since the high-gloss movements – glamorously arched torsos and half-past-12 legs – were the same whether Mozart thundered or swooned. The church incense was a nice theatrical touch, though. The evening's singular treat was Chocolate, Eleanor Sikorski's one-woman meditation on confectionery consumption. Low key, beautifully poised and wholly unpredictable, Sikorski's various ploys to restrict her sweet intake (catapulting chocolate-covered raisins from a row of forks into her mouth; melting lumps of Dairy Milk between her palms in an extended hand-jive that comes close to prayer; emitting a police-siren warning whenever cocoa solids are within range) will strike a chord with many. We've all been there, just not done that. Very funny.

Programme changes nightly to 17 Feb (020-7121 1100).

Next Week:

Jenny Gilbert sees if Carlos Acosta and Tamara Rojo can still bring a lump to the throat as Romeo and Juliet

Dance Choice

As ever, the annual London International Mime Festival promises a clutch of the freshest and most eye-popping theatre you're likely to see all year. It opens with The Table, the latest from award-winning innovators Blind Summit (above) – "a ballet of disembodied heads, dark humour and flat-pack technology" (Soho Theatre, London, Wed to 21 Jan).