A breathtaking, shimmering patchwork of an achievement.
England on Fire is BalletBoyz’ most ambitious project to date, an extraordinary collaboration between over 40 creative artists, dancers, choreographers, musicians, theatre directors, designers and composers. Inspired by curator Stephen Ellcock and writer-musician Mat Osman’s book of images, after which the piece is named, the dancers propel us into ‘a visual journey through England’s psychic landscape’.
Launched by Royal Ballet vets, now Sadler’s Wells Associate Artists Michael Nunn and William Trevitt in 2000, BalletBoyz is known for its innovative work and support of new dance makers. The company’s latest venture responds to Ellcock and Osman’s ‘magical, anarchic account of England’s maze of culture, art and history…a secret history of this country…a very English rebellion of the nameless many against the privileged few’. The performance is organised into ten chapters spanning ancient and modern worlds, in which folklore is brought to vivid, nightmarish life, monarchism is mocked and overturned, and socio-political subcultures celebrated. A portrait of a land of hope and glory this is not – rather something more enticingly rich and strange.
Lines from Ellcock and Osman’s book ring out across the theatre, the alternate evocation of pastoral scenes offset by the hallucinogenic, and warning us our journey has no destination. Spectral pagan figures loom out of the darkness. Dimly framed by Andrew Ellis’ sophisticated lighting design, a body is splayed across a lumpy altar, revealed to be made up of other bodies, dancers who unfurl and slink into the shadows. The company’s principal dancer, Artemis Stamouli, slowly, precisely, elegantly convulses. It becomes difficult to take your eyes off her, praise indeed for one in a show you want to watch as many times as there are company members, focusing your attention on each in turn. Ellis is fantastic in this respect, diverting focus with pools of light, evoking the bottom of a deep cavern or revealing a dancer previously unnoticed, a foil to Stamouli’s glow.
Stamouli writhes, folds and contorts; pitches, seems to float; is born into an unsettling landscape of England’s mythical collective memory in which masked and horned dancers envelope her. A detail from a green man depiction, and a painting of an obscure creature, in that way the middle ages hadn’t quite figured out how to paint animals yet, are splashed against the back wall – fittingly enough, for a show that makes it hard to determine what beast it is, and is all the richer for it: amorphous, staggering, many-faced, beautiful.
The first time the company dances as one is pure electricity. They shriek and vocalise, swim and scoop and beat and reach, faces twisted into silent screams. When post-punk band Gag Salon bursts onto the scene, they adopt a listening pose one by one, hands on heads, one hip cocked. They become a raving crowd, headbanging like never seen before; an exquisitely controlled unleashing of a raw, primal energy. Katharine Watt’s costumes are outstanding, borrowing elements from cabaret couture, Elizabethan pomp, britpop paraphernalia, the underbelly of Victorian city life, punk uniform, pilgrim’s tunics. Later, red stripes as if daubed in blood link the dancers and the newly centre stage St George’s Cross.
A resistance to the nationalistic imagery bubbles up, flags wielded by all fifteen dancers staring dead ahead, the unappealing red cross splayed across the stage – usually such symbols denote a particularly nasty brand of british neo-fascism, a misguided nostalgia for a non-existent pastoral idyll invented by the ruling classes to serve their own political interests. However, this production is a far cry from a blind expression of patriotism, asking us to see the country’s past in myriad and more complicated ways, unpicking the systems of oppression that riddle and deface this island’s mountains green. The keys to the labyrinth are held only by the guardians of the city, we are told, exploring origins of the gatekeeping of mass access to power, safety and economic security. Dissonant sounds as if from a xylophone of bones accompany this segment, with screeching strings, discordant shatterings, a deep pounding beat. Angela Wai-Nok Hui, Britain’s hardest working percussionist, steals the show here.
One chapter stands out for its surprising, expert physical comedy. Three dancers in shaggy rounded costumes made of rags and hidden bells tumble and play and fight, the court jesters of Where the Wild Things Are. It is all the more delightful for its grounded unexpectedness, contrasting with Stamouli’s desperate efforts to find any space left in this country to spread her wings and soar. Stamouli falls into the arms of her company, and we all take a breath with her, and dive into it, our history, our undoing. They yelp and clap and spin to a fiddle, leaning back into the manic fever dreams of a dying island.