Director and Choreographer: Shobana Jeyasingh
In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the island is often described in various ways through the eyes of the members of the shipwrecked crew. Whether for good or ill, it is something they regard as alien and mysterious. But for Caliban, whose island it is and who accuses them of taking, it has a long history before the Milanese courts arrived on its shores.
That is the inspiration for Shobana Jeyasingh’s one-hour dance reinterpretation. Here, the island belongs to the Caliban, a community rich in books and dance. In the opening sequence, the octet of dancers sometimes dances with joined hands, intertwining to symbolise the strength of their bonds. At other moments, they dance in pairs and threesomes. Even when they move into solo routines, seemingly independent of one another, individual choreographic moments are performed simultaneously between dancers. We may be individuals, the movements say, but we are united.
Jeyasingh gives this community a variety of dance influences from around the world, evoking Asian dance styles like Bharatanatyam in an environment where the projections and voiceovers place it more firmly in the history of the Caribbean. Wherever the island is situated, it stands in stark contrast to the Milanese court, whose movements are built upon Western ballet techniques. This is in strong display as Prospero is ultimately banished from the court, and he and his daughter Miranda find themselves washed up on the island.
From there, we enter a tentatively romantic pas de deux between Holly Vallis’s Miranda and Raúl Reinosa Acanda as the islander we know from The Tempest as Caliban. In Jeysingh’s reappraisal, this feels less like his name and more like merely his islander status – as if Shakespeare’s play cares not for his individual identity and refers to him only as one would to a Jamaican or Antiguan.
Still, the storytelling in this piece is interesting, as Miranda is willing to poke and prod Caliban, lifting his shirt for exploration but rebuffing him when he tries to do the same to her. The power dynamic, the assumed superiority of the colonising incomers, is reflected in dance as Vallis’s balletic style comes to dominate over Acanda’s islander fluidity.
With so much of the colonial message of We Caliban conveyed so effectively through dance, some of the projections and voice-overs need not work quite as hard to reinforce it. But it is worth reminding ourselves that Elizabeth I granted Walter Raleigh sovereignty over any lands he “discovered”, assuming they would be inhabited only by un-Christian savages, and that European colonisers would rename lands already named, loved and tended by their peoples.
Where the audio-visual work is explicit about its anti-colonial message, though, the real power of We Caliban lies in its beautiful dance. By the end, after Prospero and Miranda have returned to Europe, the Caliban are seemingly at peace again – but when Acanda’s character once again woos a woman in dance, his moves are purely balletic. The indigenous island culture has been subsumed and replaced – the most subtle of all messages in a work for which subtlety is not always visible.
Runs until 23 April 2026
