Spend about pounds 20 for a good high-street version - department stores or Accessorize have a good selection. If your outfit isn't fussy, some of these velvet or devore scarves can be worn during the day as well as the evening. They feel sumptuous next to the skin, make you look glamorous and do a fair job of keeping the chill off your neck of an evening. In semi-darkness three rough-looking shave-heads and two inscrutable girls in street gear told a compelling tale of urban angst that could have found its expression in no other form. Whether shabby or smart, The Place is the place of the moment. The contemporary dance fans' secret is out.The Place, WC1 (0171 387 0031).. Classy evening scarves are a breed apart from their woolly cousins.
During the recent Dance Umbrella performances you had to fight for a seat even to see small foreign companies no one had heard of. Last week's sold-out dates for Belgium's Compagnie Tandem were a case in point. But it turned out to be a virtuoso study of everyday street movement (folding arms, stuffing hands in pockets, shifting weight while waiting in a queue) that captured precisely our modern-day wariness of unfamiliar human contact, spinning mesmerising sequences from almost nothing. The blurb yielded only the obscure fact that Michele Noiret's work Les Plis de la nuit was inspired by engravings Hmm. The Place isn't just any old theatre in need of a facelift from Lottery money. It's the creative hub of what the Arts Council's audience audit shows to be our most burgeoning art form - the new rock n' roll And at The Place you see it in the making. Go to the cafe and eat subsidised spuds alongside London Contemporary Dance students; go to the ladies and there's leotards drying on the hot pipes, go to the bar and it's also the barre.The other draw is that for 32 weeks of the year, The Place offers cutting- edge live performance for less than the cost of a cinema ticket.
Shobana Jeyasingh made the best of a subdued grey top and skirt by Hussein Chalayan in an angular, South Indian-inspired duet which jabbed and sliced paths around the gallery's silvery statues as if they were gods in a temple. Javier de Frutos (more familiar to dance-goers in his birthday suit), clearly relished Bodymap's fake-fur trousers and matching coat, shimmying and mugging at the crowd in a hilarious speeded-up collage of catwalk manners.But the showstealer was Wayne McGregor's savage little piece for New York City Ballet dancer Antonia Franceschi. It's nice to think that The Place, in its art-house austerity, is to benefit from an outfit inspired by My Little Pony.Another irony is that few, if any, of the smart set who made up Charles and Kay Saatchi's guest-list had ever set foot in London's shabby mecca of contemporary dance And they still don't know quite what they're missing. It brought the house down, and later, when the clothes were auctioned off, a lady of mature years bid pounds 1200 for the couture. She wore Julien MacDonald's translucent beaded body-hugger trimmed with trailing white fleece like a pony's mane. Pouting and snarling, poised on viciously spread-eagled pointes, McGregor's five-minute choreography was a whistle-stop safari of jungle-animal impressions, ending in Franceschi stalking off with the disdainful gait of an ostrich.