Writer and Director: Sonny Nwachukwu
The choreopoem is a rarely seen theatrical style that uses dance, music and song to tell a poetic story. Sonny Nwachukwu uses it for his new piece Saturn Returns, showing for two nights at the Southbank Centre as part of the annual Unlimited Festival, which showcases work by disabled artists. Focusing on patterns of behaviour and cycles of history, this sometimes oblique 70-minute piece makes good use of its technical influences.
Trapped in a hinterland between realities, Ada and Obi play out the lives of Black people across history, from the mass suicide of the Igbo people in 1803 to a modern-day couple enacting ingrained gendered stereotypes and their possible future selves. Each incarnation receives the echoes of the past, a feeling they have met before in similar circumstances, wondering if redemption will ever come.
Nwachukwu’s premise is full of potential, a chance to explore inherited trauma and psychological, history and suffering within a non-standard format. The poetic rhythms of his writing are almost ethereal both in effect and content, his characters speaking in wistful tones and seemingly disconnected sentences while the illusory, transcendental space between lives is expressed in overlapping stories and snatches of emerging memory.
It is a piece that has a lot to say about the continual experience of suffering and the Christian or other worldly potential for redemption and escape while also focusing on the physicality of Black lives consumed by water, discussing hair or acknowledging their embodiment of clichés including the angry woman. But it always comes back to the disconnection from memory; ‘they scream and we don’t listen’ Nwachukwu writes, forcing his characters to relive their pain in every era.
But the constraints of the choreopoem ultimately unbalance Saturn Returns with too little time to unpick the abstract phrasing and references to major events that Nwachukwu includes in this vast work. The Igbo Landing becomes a device rather than a story point, and with its chorus-like refrain focused on entry into the water, the show never really elaborates on the wider context of this story and how it sets the scene for the experiences of Ada and Obi through the centuries.
Too much time is also dedicated to dance and symbolic movement pieces devised by Ffion Campbell-Davies and although these integrate well into the chapters of Nwachukwu’s writing, they become an increasingly tangential distraction. A long, wordless sequence towards the end is dedicated to the creation of two concentric circles laid slowly by hand in which the performers eventually dance, but the point about repetition and lives going ‘round and round’ has already been made several times. Likewise, the decision to effectively ‘rewind’ the whole show is performed with skill but it merely underscores what the audience had already been told many times.
Performers Rudzani Moleya as Ada and Durassie Kiangangu as Obi seem equally at ease as the fractious modern couple discussing their voicemails and Star Wars and as the more epic members of the Igbor people taking those important sacrificial steps. The flow between dance and dramatic scenes is equally seamless and the physical strength of the actors is well tested in the many positions of support they must give to one another.
“We must live knowingly,” Obi declares and by recognising the effect of the past it will create a better future. But Saturn Returns could be more explicit in its narrative choices, making clearer the value of and connection between the lives and eras it references, and better using its choreopoem form to add new layers of meaning.
Runs until 8 September 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Sometimes oblique
