Composers: Antonio Vivaldi and DJ Walde
Creator and Director: Tinuke Craig
Choreographer: Alexzandra Sarmiento
In this powerful celebration of friendship, the body, and being alive, 16 dancers interpret Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Skilfully mixed with pulsing electronic beats by DJ Walde, Vivaldi’s well-loved violin concertos become a joyous and poignant narrative about three friends (Head, Heart and Gut) navigating life in the city together. The story could also be read as three aspects (rational, emotional, instinctive) of a single life. Different dancers represent each season of the characters’ journey, giving rare stage space to some powerfully graceful older dancers.
For Spring, the three young friends appear in cute culottes and jackets, jumping and whirling with teenage energy. Tanesha Aba (Heart), Beryl Tay (Head) and Ethan Vijn (Gut) channel spirited youthful exuberance. Set and costume designer Ryan Dawson Laight has created highly stylised skyscrapers for the urban backdrop, enhanced with shifts of shade and emphasis by Zeynep Kepekli’s lighting design. The costumes are as bright as a new Netflix drama with Gut in neon orange, Heart in Barbie pink, and Head in sky blue. Their textured, layered tactility keeps the three characters distinct, with dancers joining the neutral-toned ensemble when the story moves on or reappearing in colour to interact symbolically with their older selves.
At the other end of the show, the Winter concerto, with its harpsichord-backed violin solos, is mesmerising. The dancers radiate emotional depths, understanding, complexity. Mark Smith, in Heart’s bright pink suit, brings a joyous energy. Mami Tomotani is a delicate, life-affirming Gut and Susan Kempster a twinkling, nuanced Head. All three have danced internationally, have worked extensively as directors and choreographers and are beautiful to watch.
The choreographer of A Life in Four Seasons, Alexzandra Sarmiento, has brilliantly mixed sections of individual expressive movement with synchronised ensemble work. Dramatic dance patterns change and interweave to suggest ways in which our unique emotional lives interact with a wider community and the physical world.
Louis Mackrodt (Head), Emi Ichikawa (Heart) and a particularly energetic Michael Naylor (Gut) leap across the stage as they represent the three friends in Summer at the taxing, turbulent height of their powers. The dancers playing each character are of varied genders and ethnicities, but they explore the same basic characteristics. One of the production’s themes is how we can develop over a lifetime and how far we stay essentially the same.
For the Autumn concerto, Robia Brown (Heart), Carrie-Anne Ingrouille (Head) and Nadia Sohawon (Gut) take centre stage. The Autumn dancers’ costumes have ribbons like medical gowns, and wistfulness enters the choreography with the stresses of middle age.
Director Tinuke Craig, who is Associate Artistic Director of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, points out in a programme interview that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are part of the ambient soundtrack of our lives, whether we know it consciously or not: “anyone who’s phoned the NHS will recognise it as hold music. It gets used in lifts and waiting spaces, as old ringtones and TikTok sounds, it turns up on TV in sports montages … and countless adverts…”
Sound designer Max Pappenheim incorporates ringing phones into the music along with the rumbles of urban life. Regent’s Park brings a chorus of its own with pigeons, parakeets and seagulls adding to the audio-visuals. This is an innovative and daring experiment in bringing together dancers of different ages, trained in varied styles around the world. Together they have created something greater than the sum of its parts. The director and choreographer have harnessed the power of the dancers’ disparate approaches. Craig says A Life in Four Seasons: “aims to examine who we are, what we can change and what we can’t, and how we can grow to love ourselves and each other over the course of a life.”
Runs until 14 June 2026
