Mette Ingvartsen: Skatepark – Sadler’s Wells East, London

Choreographer: Mette Ingvartsen

In the decades since its invention, skateboarding has grown into a mass-market activity. At the elite level, it has been featured in the last two Summer Olympic Games, while elsewhere, it has spawned subcultures that have pervaded clothing, music, and all aspects of popular culture. Musically, skate culture embraces elements of both punk and hip-hop, rejoicing in the extremes without diluting them.

Choreographer Metter Ingvartsen celebrates this with a new work that converts Sadler’s Wells East’s enormous stage into a plywood skate park, sturdy quarterpipes dotted around the edges supplemented with a variety of movable ramps and grind rails. After a pre-show in which a group of young people enjoy just hanging about and practising their moves, Skatepark proper begins with a man sliding into a couple of tyres, then gradually rolling himself across the stage while boarders jump over him.

If that sounds simple, that’s probably because it is. But in Ingvartsen’s world, even the simplest activity has meaning. Her ensemble of players – mostly on boards, but with two inline roller skaters and a couple of breakdancing acrobats – is not here to show off for the audience with technical trickery, but to celebrate in the art, and the fun, of hanging out.

There is method in Ingvartsen’s choreography, to be sure. When multiple skaters leap off the same quarter pipe, or a dancer and a roller skater take turns to turn a leap into the air into a handstand, such set pieces highlight the show’s meticulous planning. But while the whole 80-minute work has planned phases, from the whole group circling the park as if at an outdoor roller disco to an impromptu game of basketball with the opening set piece’s tyres repurposed as hoops, the emphasis is to recreate that feeling of hanging out in the sunshine, being with one’s friends at the park.

As with any skate park, there’s an awful lot of falling off. Even if the tricks the skates are trying to pull look less impressive than those one might see at the Olympics, there are still occasions when faltering and missing the mark occur. Boards fly off into the wings, or even into the (wisely empty) front row of the seating. That’s life, Skatepark tells us. We pick ourselves up and get back on the board.

Even the elements that would imply a sense of competition – a sequence in which skaters try and jump over a growing stack of boards, for example – it is not the success or failure that is the point, but the sensation of being with friends who are cheering you on even when you fail.

The use of live mics, loop machines and an electric guitar help to elevate the music, making it feel an organic part of a day at this skate park. And it does feel like a day in the life, especially during a hypnotic torchlight session where it feels like skating around, trick-free, under the stars is the best place in the world to be.

Jennifer Defays’s costumes fit the bill, apart from a frustrating use of masks. At the start of the show, many performers have expressionless, ill-fitting masks on under their hoodies – but as they are peeled off, the reason for their existence never becomes clear. Maybe it’s an intent to take the anonymity of the “skater” stereotype – something that older generations typically distrust – and show that these are just young people having fun together. If that’s the case, the masks’ reappearance at the end, especially when supplemented with much scarier clown masks for other skaters in the ensemble, doesn’t quite tie up with that.

But that aside, there is something remarkable at work to watch skaters at play. Mette Ingvarson takes an informal, disorganised activity and gives it just enough structure to make us appreciate the skill and camaraderie involved; from a distance, it really can be appreciated as a dance. But most of all, Skatepark reminds us how fun and precious time with friends can be.

Continues until 12 April 2025