Choreographers: John-William Watson, Magnus Westwell, Olive Hardy and Vidya Patel
Young Associates is an excellent concept, providing both real opportunity for young artists to showcase their ideas, and a chance for audiences to see new exciting talent. It’s inevitably going to be a mixed bag, because whilst on the one hand a select group of 18–30-year-olds offers fresh perspectives and unfettered enthusiasm, they’re also inexperienced by definition.
Tonight’s performance sees four choreographers, under the guidance of Ben Duke, bring their concepts to the stage: the opener – John-William Watson’s Hang In There, baby – is a two-parter, first enacting a Pac-Man-esque office nightmare in which a worker ultimately decides to beat their boss to death with a keyboard, and the second a high-kicking, sequin-covered jazz number advertising the opportunity to play out any number of risky scenarios (in dance form of course) so you can decide if, for example, it is actually a good idea to kill your boss with a keyboard. Not only is this clever and unexpected, it’s also genuinely funny. Performances are tight and deceptively simple.
What follows are three very serious performances, all with obvious talent and skill, but without anything particularly unexpected. Coming in at around twenty minutes each, it’s hard for the mind not to wander with so much stern-faced earnestness. There are a few moments of sheer beauty and powerful expression, but they’re largely swallowed up by the length and abstractness across all three performances.
As one has come to expect at Sadler’s, the lighting and production are artworks in and of themselves. At the start of Magnus Westwell’s Sunder, for example, the stage is subsumed in darkness and a single violinist is back-lit in the orchestra pit, smoke machines puffing from every angle, as the music grows in melancholic yearning. Finally, as the violin peaks, a row of spotlights can be vaguely seen on stage, fighting through the smoke, before the full lights rise and the dance begins.
There’s nothing lacklustre about the night’s performances, merely an excessive amount of sobriety and angst.
Reviewed on 26 October 2022
