Photos: International Dance Day at Grand Parade

City hall turns into a lunch-hour dance hall.

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Plenty of people stopped to watch the dance spectacle today at Grand Parade, in honour of Unesco's International Day of Dance. First, Sarah Cox's beautiful piece, Open Fan, soothed the crowd with its meditative gestures, based the traditional movements of Japanese Bugaku. I saw Susanne Chui's The Longest Now, back in January, when it was choreographed for about 10 dancers on a small stage. Now with 30 and in an open public place, it has an entirely different context, almost like a flash dance mob or protest. In fact, when it started, a few people watching looked really confused. The claustrophobic confinement of the Seahorse stage is now replaced with sun and air—at times it looked as if these dancers were waiting for the sky to drop.