Founded back in 2001 with the intention of addressing a perceived lack of opportunity for Black and Asian performers in a dance world we’d hardly recognise today, Ballet Black is now fast approaching its silver anniversary and, as well as surely having achieved its purpose, is a firm fixture on the touring circuit. Making another welcome (although brief) visit north of the Border, they offered a new double bill comprising the mysterious A Shadow Work by American choreographer Chanel DaSilva, here making her UK and Ballet Black debut, and a darkly comic adaptation of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s bestselling novel, My Sister, The Serial Killer by BB’s founder, Cassa Pancho.
Until I read the programme, I didn’t know that ‘shadow work’ was a term used in Jungian therapy to denote a technique through which we discover our ‘true’ selves by examining and coming to terms with those less attractive aspects of ourselves that we’re usually taught to repress. In the ballet, this is expressed through a mysterious box (rather like Pandora’s, although we’re now supposed to call that a jar) with which the central character toys throughout. She (Taraja Hudson) is lissom and lonely in white, while all around her are sculptural figures shrouded in black, often set against or merging with the shady background and so namelessly intimidating.
The stunning lighting (well done, David Plater) shafts across the stage, obscuring, spotlighting and sometimes fragmenting the bodies, while Hudson mingles with or flees from the wraiths in black, representing the issues she doesn’t want to address but can’t quite leave alone, until one of them, Acaoã de Castro, emerges as the figure who encourages her to confront them. Throughout, the ensemble fragments into pas de deux, trios and brief solos.
Hudson is both commanding and vulnerable, responding in solos with fluttering hands and shimmying legs, sometimes literally running away (on the spot and fixed in spotlight), while her brave couplings with de Castro draw on classical technique as well as daring. The company is in fine form, all of them athletically adventurous and impossibly pliant. Although relatively unknown over here, DaSilva has worked with major companies in the States and was the first Black woman to choreograph for the Joffrey Ballet. Her experience shows, and the company has responded brilliantly to her extraordinary vision.
If that first piece defied our natural demand for narrative in dance, the second made the most of it. Korede (Isabela Coracy) and Ayoola (Helga Paris-Morales) are devoted sisters, which is lovely: family, after all, is the main thing, isn’t it? Trouble is, Ayoola just can’t help murdering the men in her life (‘in self-defence’), leaving her sister to clean up the mess and dispose of the bodies. This is clearly getting out of hand, and when Ayoola starts pursuing her sister’s love object, Dr Tade (Ebony Thomas), Korede fears the inevitable outcome and has to make a choice… It’s a great crime caper and makes a blackly comic half-hour. Cassa Pancho has filleted the book and wisely jettisoned minor characters, zeroing in on the sisterly relationship. Ayoola strolls through the piece with an insouciant jazzy wiggle, while poor Korede scurries about with rubber gloves and bleach, physically threatened by (once again) a chorus of dark-clad ghostly figures as she tries to enjoy her relationship.
It’s a cleverly chosen double bill: each piece so different in kind but calling on similarities: moral issues to address; minimal design with lighting a key feature; the ensemble of ghoulish spectres haunting the stage. And the dancing, as ever with this company, was intoxicating. You didn’t need to have read the novel or, indeed, to be well versed in Carl Jung to enjoy this evening. BB may not be on a mission any more but they are so good to have around.
