Choreographer and Director: Holly Blakey
Holly Blakey’s new work A Wound With Teeth – itself a preview of a larger work, Lo, that is due to debut in 2026 – is so deliciously, gloriously abstract that one needs to read upon the choreographer’s intentions to decipher some of its deeper meanings.
That’s not strictly necessary, of course. The near hour-long work is so inventive, wry and watchable that one can just sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Men wear jockstraps on top of silk boxer shorts, while women have dresses tucked into their pants at the back, or have large peephole cutouts on their leggings. One man sports a sequinned headdress-cum-balaclava with ends that form a long, flowing scarf, the disco baby of Donna Summer and Isadora Duncan. At one point, a dancer waddles on stage in a sea-blue contraption, her head tipped back, lost in fabric as if it is floating in a portable ocean; minutes later, another dancer is lowered on top of her, and she takes that ocean to become a bustled skirt. Matthew Josephs’s idiosyncratic costume designs, all post-apocalyptic glam rock and thrift shop eccentricity, chime well with Blakey’s quirky, dynamic dance style.
At several points, the company of ten dancers split into one, twos and threes, providing visual spectacle wherever one looks. But nothing ever feels fragmented; even those groups performing separately have a consistent tone and movement that shows them to be a unified whole, and the progressions between each sequence are seamless.
The programme notes indicate that A Wound With Teeth is about forgetting and our ability to remember. While that’s not immediately obvious, the thought that the characters on stage may be the constructions of a mind desperate to fill the holes in one’s memory with a slightly demented cast of twisted nursery rhyme characters does chime with what we witness. In interviews, Blakey talks about recently rediscovering facts about her year spent in a mental health institution as a child and how her body had let her forget about all aspects of that time. Taking the place of that trauma is a fantasy filled with choreography inspired by folk traditions.
Gwilym Gold’s musical score, which similarly embraces a multitude of tonal patterns to complement both the dance moves and costumes, remains for some time after the lights have come down on the performers. It’s a weird sensation, but accentuates the work’s incomplete nature, as if being ripped from the great whole of Lo has left uneven edges at its end.
After a short break, the same company performs the first live performance of Phantom, a piece devised in lockdown. In 2021, Blakey, who had just miscarried, leant in once again to her own trauma to produce a piece that is, on the face of it, a joyous work. Featuring much more whole-ensemble work than A Wound with Teeth, there’s the sense of a festival atmosphere at times, even though it starts off with mournful chants reminiscent of a funeral.
That dichotomy is present throughout and is compounded when, among the revelries and uniform choreography, one woman is left convulsing in pain, alone among the masses. Much of this work occurs with the house lights up and a bright, near-daylight light flooding the stage. Perhaps that is to show that women are suffering like this, surrounded by love and yet alone, not only on stage but around us everywhere, all the time.
Where the ending of A Wound with Teeth is nebulous and torn, Phantom is abrupt and definitive. It says what it wants to say about the choreographer’s personal traumas, and is done. Perhaps that is why, as the dancers take their bows and leave the stage, it is the shorter, older piece that feels the more profound and long-lasting.
Continues until 11 April 2025
The Reviews Hub Score
Profound exploration of personal trauma
