gr oo ve is a haunting solo that traces a slow transformation from instinct to identity through rhythm, repetition, and raw physicality.
As part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, gr oo ve arrived at Sadler’s Wells as one of the more quietly intense pieces in the programme—a stark, slow-burning solo that left a lasting imprint.
The theatre is in complete darkness. Not the usual dimmed house lights, but a blackness so total it is disorienting. I couldn’t tell whether the show had begun or if we were still waiting. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the space began to shift. A faint light appeared, or maybe it was just my eyes adjusting. Either way, something was there, emerging.
You hear it before you fully see it. A breath—ragged, deliberate. Then a body begins to crawl out of the black, every movement deeply tied to the rhythm of its breath. The performer, Soa Ratsifandrihana, draws you in with a kind of visceral precision. Her breathing and movement are in such tight conversation, it’s impossible to tell which one is driving the other. Is the breath birthing the movement? Or is the movement gasping for breath?
This is how gr oo ve begins. It doesn’t explode into being—it emerges, like something ancient waking up. Something pre-human.
The audience is seated on all four sides of the square performance space, and Soa moves to each edge in turn, repeating a sequence of gestures that feel almost ritualistic, as if she’s honouring each direction, or each viewer. The repetition builds something tangible: a pattern, a rhythm, a memory in the body.
And then, something shifts. The crawling gives way to standing. The creature becomes woman. Her movements become more fluid, but not more predictable. She begins to stretch, fold, twist—pushing against the edges of the invisible box around her. It’s a transformation: not just physical, but emotional. What was once elemental starts to become personal.
I found the piece quietly extraordinary. It doesn’t scream for attention. It breathes its way into you. There’s something deeply felt and unspoken about the way Soa moves, as if she’s carrying the memory of something much older than herself.
Soa is of Madagascan heritage, and while the work never literalises this, it carries an energy that feels rooted in something ancestral. A specific gesture—tracing a line from the ground, up through the body to the mouth and back out—threads its way through the piece, appearing like a quiet refrain. Just as present is a deep, kneeling back-arch, a movement that recurs across the shifting phases of the performance, linking them with a sense of continuity and memory. The rawness of her breath and the groundedness of her body suggested someone dancing not to be seen, but to be understood.
As for the title—gr oo ve—I kept returning to it. Why split it that way? It’s clever. It hints at a disruption within flow. A groove that’s been broken or interrupted, maybe reassembled. Just like the performance: rhythmical, but fractured; sensual, but abstract. The extra space draws attention to the space within the rhythm, the breath within the beat.
gr oo ve is not a show that tells you what to think. It invites you into a dark, quiet place and asks you to listen differently, to see differently, to feel rhythm not just as sound or movement, but as something alive—something becoming.
I walked out of Sadler’s Wells feeling like I had witnessed a kind of slow birth—from breath to body, from animal to human, from darkness into form.