Sadler’s Wells Young Associates Four bill, 2024
This years Sadler’s Wells Young Associates Four bill features works by Roseann and Sula, Maiya Leeke, Elisabeth Mulenga and BLUE MAKWANA…
BLUE MAKWANA’s ‘Toasted’, part of Sadler’s Wells Young Associates Four bill. © Jack Thomson
Sadler’s Wells Young Associates
Four bill
DUG MEAT: Roseann and Sula
To Loss and Hope: Maiya Leeke
Christ Alone: Elisabeth Mulenga
Toasted: BLUE MAKWANA
★★★✰✰
London, Sadler’s Wells
15 October 2024
www.sadlerswells.com
Sadler’s Wells Young Associates programme “…supports talented 18-25-year-olds and 18-30 for d/Deaf and disabled choreographers for two and a half years, providing a crucial first step into their career as choreographers.”
And the Four bill is the culmination of all this investment and effort - a graduation show, if you like, with all the bells and whistles that can be conjured on the Wells stage. It must seem like a giddy amount of support for young creatives to get when they are often scratching around for any exposure. The support environment is not just all the skilled people Sadler’s Wells draws in but also a very supportive audience for this one-night-only event. Like any graduate show, you got the feeling that friends and young colleagues were out in force, come to roar their approval for all the effort put in regardless of its impact or possible effectiveness - a night of celebration before this year’s cohort emerge into what can be a very harsh commissioning world.
So, what are my overall takeaways from Four about the way forward currently being charted by young choreographers? Encouragingly, everybody clearly wanted to put on a show that was big on theatrical values and bristling with ideas. Less encouragingly, choreography and fascinating original steps seemed less important than the theatrical. And in support of the action, the music/soundscapes often had foundation-shaking levels of bass - which is starting to get a bit boring and passée now. Lighting was a mix of very dark and in-your-face bright and mega industrial quantities of Haze seemed needed to complete an often grungy, urban look. In general, I’d also defy anybody to look at the stage and clearly link it to the brief programme notes about the intention and inspiration for each work. There could be some very arresting stage images, but too often, I was left perplexed by the stage action.
Elisabeth Mulenga’s Christ Alone stood out for the surreal world it conjured, which seemed to channel Pina Bausch and William Forsythe’s less dancey works. What impressed here was the total commitment of her four dancers, often with bizarre fixed smiles, slowly moving and interacting in very odd ways as if in a dream. It brought back memories of seeing Hofesh Shechter’s Theatre of Dreams! last week on the same stage and (dream wise) Mulenga delivered a more absorbing bit of theatre. Although the title hints at it, the inspiration came from growing up within Pentecostal Christianity, and that didn’t really come over to me.
The programme note for DUG MEAT starts, “DUG MEAT is a work about the inevitable, it is a nihilistic take on our future”. Gulp. Full credit to the creators, Roseann and Sula, for having live music on stage from guitarist Steve Ashmore - a loud mix of fractured scrapings and full-on heavy metal rock that only sometimes seemed to align with the movement. After a slow start, there was lots of movement, sphinx looks, wrestling, flailing hair, pogoing, and dancers lost in a trance, to mention just a few sections. It seemed an ever-restless work that didn’t dwell on any one thing long enough to connect and make a point.
To Loss and Hope takes inspiration from Maiya Leeke’s considerable ups and downs in living with a disability; “…the piercing light of hope, how profound the darkness is when it’s lost”. For three dancers, at first, it seemed to struggle under its loud soundscape and endless playing with lengths of fabric. But after what sounds like a car accident, things become less austere, and we get some fine noodling under Amelia Hawkes’s impressive stadium lights before To Loss closes with a short, beautiful, and uplifting solo - more of that, please.
The night closed out with the most choreographic-led piece of the four - BLUE MAKWANA’s Toasted. I love that MAKWANA describes what she is about as “…(to) make work that is entertaining and continuously evolving.” Huzzah - somebody who openly acknowledges that any and every audience is there to be entertained in some way. From the off, you can see MAKWANA is about structure and steps, and her six dancers were impossible to ignore as they devoured the stage. I’m not sure I saw anything that was gobsmackingly new (in movement terms), but there is almost a West End slickness here, especially under Hawkes’s stadium light show. It’s confident movement and after a night of what could be pretty obtuse choreography, it was most welcome. I’m certainly interested in what MAKWANA does next if her programme note picked up on the obtuse theme: “The bandwagon that fuelled fire, the trend that steers perspectives, the phenomenon that creates havoc on scales mass and minute. When did it start? When does it end?” Gulp, Gulp!