Choreographer: Alexandrine Yewande Hemsley
Yewande 103 is an improvising performance troupe that has chosen to share its musing in movement with an audience at the Lilian Baylis studio of Sadler’s Wells Theatre.
The hour-long event begins with a drawn-out speech-cum-poem from one of the performers, followed by a long sequence of laying out a big silk carpet, followed by another performer crawling under it and standing, squatting, sitting beneath the shroud, followed by dividing up the fabric and distributing it to the audience in the front row. And that takes care of half the advertised running time.
The rest of the performance consists of probably improvised movement sequences by each of the five performers in turn. The lights fade from very dim to not quite so dim, and the musical accompaniment is a series of short phrases repeated a lot on various instruments.
It isn’t a bad performance. It arguably isn’t a performance at all, more a company workshop in front of a room full of watchers. There is a long list of trigger warnings outside the performance space, but it is very hard to detect any engagement with any themes apart from a collective involvement in moving and occasionally vocalising.
The group has been set up by Alexandrine Yewande Hemsley, Yewande being the Yoruba name of an ancestor who lived to be 103. They describe the performance as: ‘a gentle evening of mesmerising solos and (…) movement tenderly transforming between one performer and the next.’ And that’s fair, if the audience has a low mesmerism threshold. There is emphasis on mutual care, mutual acceptance, compassion. The company describes the show as being “steeped in personal archives around change, loss, acts of remembrance and the passage of time.”
And all of these things are doubtless sincerely meant. It isn’t clear, though, how fully the mutual care of the performers extends to a room full of watching strangers. An evening that may be of great value to the company, less useful for an audience.
Runs until 27 March 2026
