Choreographers and Directors: Chanel daSilva and Cassa Pancho
Dance is a powerful medium for communicating emotion, for engaging the senses, for offering grace and beauty and precision that can make spectators swoon. Ballet Black has a full complement of dancers who can achieve those ends and then some. What dance finds difficult is carrying narrative, particularly if that narrative is nuanced or complex. Ballet Black has come to Sadler’s Wells for the express purpose of telling stories.
They are presenting a two-part programme, the first part of which is titled A Shadow Work. A solo dancer clad in pristine white solos elegantly, aside from moments when she executes a peculiar move involving setting her knees at right angles and wobbling across the stage like a space invader. It is a jarring piece of choreography, obviously fully intended, mystifying.
She is surrounded by figures in black gauzy costumes (shadows? We suspect as much). One of their number proffers a box, is insistent that she takes the box, and will not let her ignore the box. The box is important. Eventually, she opens the box, then leaves it unattended and ignored stage right while she gets on with dancing in the midst of a sombre ensemble. There is a repetition of the right-angled knees movement. Personifying a box, perhaps?
An extensive programme note informs us that Carl Jung discussed a “shadow self”, and suggested that throughout our lives we put unwanted aspects of ourselves into a bag (or box), and at some point we have to deal with the contents of our bag (or box). So that’s what the box means. So that’s why elegant dancers make those awkward shapes. But it shouldn’t require referencing the programme to work out what the dancers “mean”. And if the box means so much, it shouldn’t be discarded. It’s the only prop on stage; it should continue to speak.
The second part is entitled My Sister, The Serial Killer. It is a dance version of a horror novel of the same title by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and the dance is narratively comprehensive – there are two sisters, one is sensual and slinky, and the other is a hard-working nurse. The slinky one seduces random men, lures them back to her place, kills them, and summons her sister to clean up the mess. So far, so straightforward. It does, however, involve the dancer presenting the nurse character doing an inordinate amount of phone-checking, bagful-packing, floor-mopping, and the donning of rubber gloves. None of these activities, particularly the gloves, is naturally elegant. Cassa Pancho’s choreography doesn’t manage to square that particular circle.
Ballet Black produces outstandingly fine dance pieces, and perhaps should get some recognition for attempting a new approach. The result isn’t a roaring success. Telling difficult stories, or discussing complex psychological theories, is better accomplished with those things dancers generally eschew – words.
Runs until 29 November 2025
