Choreographer and Director: Jasmin Vardimon
There is a real darkness at the heart of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, one that makes it endless inventible for adults and children alike. Jasmin Vardimon’s latest interpretation, arriving at Sadler’s Wells for two nights, is a bleak and bizarre experience, following a version of Alice who may be an innocent girl searching for Wonderland or equally someone developing her adult body and navigating the treacherous path to womanhood through a series of decisive experiences. One thing is certain, nothing is what is seems.
Divided into six chapters across 80-minutes ALiCE has all the expected pitstops including encounters with the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter and even a final croquet match played with flamingos, but Vardimon’s vision is an absurdist one, more so than Carroll’s, placing Alice in a scenario that blurs innocent adventures and totalitarian control, giving Wonderland itself a dystopian feel governed by a cat-suited monarch and stylised military guards.
Set designers Guy Bar-Amotz and Vardimon create a giant revolving book, the fabric pages of which are the basis for Alice’s various encounters sometimes fun and silly, but other times spinning wildly, almost trapping her inside. Vardimon introduces stark tonal shifts through music choices that range from Bach to drum and bass mirrored in Andrew Crofts’ lighting design that creates different kinds of atmosphere that blend and contort throughout.
And there is some really interesting work using silhouettes and projection, also created by Crofts, in which scary arms reach in to snap at or attack the frightened shadow-Alice, sometimes pressing her softly on the nose, at others clawing at her dress and face. Crofts also uses some projection magic to imply the rapid shrinking of the title character by distorting the images to suggest speed and scale.
So, with plenty of imagination at play, that just leaves the storytelling and choreographer to bring it all together which it does to a point, although there are long surrealist passages that don’t fully contribute to the overall effect. The fairground notion of a mirror-distorted Alice is repeated in a segment danced to Living Next Door to Alice which is energetic but adds very little. Neither do the slightly menacing versions of Tweedledum and Tweedledee reimagined as predatory street dancers that one version of Alice flirts with.
Much more effective, though equally tangential, is a sequence looking at two sides of a relationship, a fantasy vision on one half of the stage as the mirror-Alice and her partner revel in their softly lit romance, but as they cross the threshold into a bare room the feeling between them changes to rage as a domestic abuse narrative notes the coming-of-age reality of this relationship. It’s not vital to the plot but it’s an interesting fantasy texture.
There are a lot of parents with their children at the Press performance and this show comes with a 7+ guidance warning, but this doesn’t feel like a piece aimed at a young audience. It’s big, colourful and strange but it’s also messy, complicated and filled with an adult symbolism that twists Carroll’s tale into new shapes that is hard enough to fathom as a grown-up and might be quite alarming to a child.
Still, Jasmin Vardimon’s ALiCE is an interesting combination of techniques and devices, with some impressive choreographic choices, not least in the multiple applications of the caterpillar laid like a breadcrumb trail through the performance. This is certainly a new take on Alice in Wonderland if one that will leave you scratching your head and borrowing a line from Alice herself, ‘curiouser and curiouser’
Runs until 28 October 2022
