Choreographer: Becky Namgauds
Like a Miles Aldridge photograph come to life, Becky Namgauds’ new show THE HEAT, performed at Sadler’s Wells, aches with domestic despair and suburban apocalypse as five women are overlaid in the same living room space. Lit with high saturation contrasted with gloomy, noirish danger by Zoé Ritchie, Namgauds’ 60-minute piece is strongest when exploring the repetitive confinement of its subjects in the home but struggles for coherence when it pursues humanity’s primal instincts beyond this space.
In creating the movement style, Namgauds is inspired by Paula Rego’s painting Dog Woman, which depicts a contorted female form, crouched into a canine shape with torso pulled into itself, making the thighs more prominent. Throughout THE HEAT, the choreographer finds innovative ways to utilise and expand this expressive shaping as her dancers explore unusual movements within their bodies to travel around the performance area, often backwards with strangely angled limbs aloft.
The recurring concept is of the headless woman, the performers tipping their necks backwards to create the illusion (or using their long hair to imply) that their heads are on backwards, linking nicely to the political undercurrents of the work, of women and their roles as socially constructed Frankenstein creatures. Feeding this through both the unusual movement and the storytelling is particularly successful, exploring the desire for freedom and expression that sits beneath the veneer of domestic boredom. The opening section, in which a plastic wrapping is removed from the perfect home, has a cinematic quality but sets the scene well for the emotional frustrations to emerge.
Namgauds takes two approaches to representing that inner wildness in the show. The more successful idea gives the five dancers pockets of chaos to react to, throwing themselves around as they fight against their cage. Later, sexual frustration is explored in an increasingly amusing scene based on vibrating bodies experiencing extended pleasure and orgasm from their domestic furnishing and appliances, all of which point to the inner life stifled by the outer expectations. The ways in which Namgauds transitions back from these energetic sequences to quiet but deadening routine are particularly skilful.
But THE HEAT also wants to look at more expressionistic and experimental concepts, using the nudity of its performers to reconsider the body (again with the head tucked away) and view it as an alternative creature, drawing back to Rego’s painting and its animalistic shapes. A long sequence at the end of the show brings all dancers back to the stage, beginning with a birth and a flailing body, after which Namgauds’ creatures slowly emerge through the shadows, backs bent over. And it starts to feel like two different shows: one a clear comment on female social roles, the other more interested in how to light and change the body to seem like something else.
Performers Bea Bidault, Bonni Bogya, Caroline Reece, Yen-Ching Lin and Namgauds offer technically accomplished and quite complex movements, delivering pace and tonal changes with precision, and there is much to admire in the choreographer’s focus on the implications of domestic spaces both as places of replicated female conditioning and sources of comfort or refuge. But THE HEAT is trying to cover too many things, and its two separately strong concepts ultimately dilute each other.
Reviewed on 22 May 2025
