Voila! Theatre Festival 2025: Never Just I – Theatro Technis, London

Writer and Choreographer: Evie Demetriou

Evie Demetriou’s movement has a beautiful imprecision to it, capturing the fragility of Never Just I’s message. Women in Demetriou’s piece are human, imperfect, powerful and vulnerable. They are not superwomen, however wonderful they are. They are mothers who yearn with tenderness to be sensual, despite the restraints of a caring role.

The recurrent motifs in Demetriou’s choreography bring lightness and humour through repetition, transition from awkward to heartfelt. This provides much-needed clarity to a Taylor Swift soundtracked section that threatens to fall flat under the weight of Swift’s threadbare status as a feminist icon.

For the most part, however, Never Just I has no soundtrack or score, and its silence creates space for audience contemplation of Demetriou’s multifaceted style. Blending ballet, acrobatics, and freestyle, her choreography sometimes fails to resonate with the deeper meaning of Never Just I’s theme.

So too do the spoken sections. There is a thinness to Demetriou’s words when so much space is given to consider how they convey the hefty questions they raise. Womanhood is pointed to without an intensity of emotion. Perhaps, though, Never Just I is referencing a simplicity of the true answer to such a complex question. By choosing to dress in a mundane pink tracksuit, Demetriou appears to say that to be a woman and mother is to just be a person like anyone else. To verbalise her experience at this intersection is merely to tell the banality of everyday life, playing with her children after school, encouraging their interests, and passing down the quiet love that she herself received from her mother.

The limited lighting and bare staging imply that the relative simplicity of the words and choreography is less a rigorously considered artistic choice, and more a concept that is not yet fully fleshed out. Never Just I feels like a tangled work-in-progress which has an unfulfilled premise. To be a woman is to have a body, and exploring that through contemporary dance has a chance to uncover a rich vein, but in its current form, Never Just I is too sparse to fully grasp the wealth of feeling that lies underneath its surface.

 Reviewed on 18 November 2025