Roberta Jean: Ways of Being – Sadler’s Wells, London

Choreographer and Director: Roberta Jean

Robert Jean’s new devised piece Ways of Being combines poetic reflection on female bodies and mental health with music and freestyle dance. Performed at Sadler’s Wells’ Lilian Baylis studio, this 60-minute work takes the audience through a fractured history of mental health assessment and various clinical as well as natural remedies while advocating for greater understanding of the experience of those suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts which are evoked through dance.

There is a narrative shape to Ways of Being, beginning with a dancer unable to connect with the world, slowly emerging into a standing position and starting to interact. Accompanied by a spoken-word soundtrack by Jude Christian, the show draws connections between fertility, female hysteria, reproductive fears and alternative methods of procreation, capturing the weight of expectation placed on individual bodies but also the wider existential obsessions with the place of that body in space, time and in nature.

And through this, the narrator, voiced by Christian, introduces medical interventions and intentions in treating mental health conditions, listing the many types of drugs and plants that have been used in managing symptoms. Choreographically, Jean creates a feeling of improvisation, of each dancer following their own independent path through the show and still somehow alone, even when they interact with each other. With four performers introduced at intervals across the hour-long dance, the idea of multiple struggles happening separately and together is strongly conveyed.

But much of Ways of Being is scattered, often deliberately opaque in its approach that never fully marries dance with music and Christian’s more literary reflections. The four dancers – Stephanie McMann, Katye Coe, Maëva Berthelot and Nicole Nevitt – are not given movements that equate to Christian’s poetic writing and sometimes work against the refined and articulate complexity of the text.

The tempo certainly changes across this piece, a shifting mass of emotions that becomes faster-paced and more frenzied later in the performance. Jean’s choreography tries to conceal itself behind upward stretches, running around and broad shapes created by the bodies of the dancers who imply improvisation. They convey isolation and delirium, barely recognising the existence of each other but there is little introspection or attempt to inhabit the words spoken by Christian.

There are varied music and soundscape choices by Jonathan Webb that mix crunching forest and elemental sounds with compositions by Martina Lussi, Kali Malone, Kristin Oppenheim, Tom Recchion, and Ingar Zach which change the mood and intensity of Ways of Being really nicely to create variety. And while it never fully immerses the audience in its semi-alienating approach, Jean’s piece certainly holds your attention.

Runs Until 10 November 2023