In Vardimon’s ALiCE, we are all in motion crossing thresholds, chasing meaning, and becoming along the way.
I have long admired Jasmin Vardimon, not just as a choreographer, but as a conceptual force in dance. Her work has a way of stripping away the superficial, digging deep into the bones of a story, and rebuilding it through movement, digital projections and perspective manipulation. So walking into Sadler’s Wells for her ALiCE, I wasn’t expecting a literal trip down the rabbit hole. I was expecting a transformation. And she didn’t disappoint.
Where Lewis Carroll wrote a whimsical coming-of-age tale, Vardimon gives us a coming-of-life. Her ALiCE isn’t a girl learning to navigate childhood, but a figure (perhaps all of us) emerging into existence, stumbling into identity, desire, fear, power, and eventually, the quiet reckoning of death over 6 chapters.
The opening sequence set the tone: Alice isn’t born, she’s pulled into being first from a two-dimensional existence in a digital realm, and then into the wonderland of life by arms grasping at her from behind a door. In the next chapter, we meet Alice grappling with identity. There’s a point where you realise: Jasmin doesn’t just want us to watch Alice. She wants us to see ourselves in her. Alice becomes a vessel, a mirror. Identity here is not something fixed or singular. It is fluid, shaped by others, fractured by time.
Through relationships with lovers, with aggressors, with strange and fantastical figures we see Alice morph. She oscillates between love and manipulation, tenderness and control. The Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, even the elusive Cheshire Cat, they’re not just quirky side characters. They are representations of the people and forces that define us or try to.
The performance builds toward a devastatingly beautiful metaphor: the Red Queen, as death. That chapter lands hard: visually arresting, emotionally sharp. But the final chapter, Time Again, undoes you. It plays like the soft echo of memory, slow-motion sequences of everything Alice has lived, like those 15 minutes before death people say we’re granted. Everything was slowed, synced, and utterly human.
The set design, created in collaboration between Vardimon and Guy Bar-Amotz, is a masterpiece of conceptual clarity. At the centre is a giant book, its pages turned to reveal projections, figures, and even entire scenes. There’s something profoundly melancholic in the image of a page turning. It suggests both progress and loss. Alice herself is seen emerging from the digital page into three-dimensional life, a clever merging of medium and metaphor.
And then there is the door in the wall, the threshold between worlds, perhaps between life and whatever comes after. It lingers in your mind, a reminder of all the transitions we face, often blindly. The liminal spaces we cross without even realising.
The choreography is performed with extraordinary physicality. The dancers shift without effort between street dance, acrobatics, contemporary movement, and physical theatre, constructing moments of tension, grace, humour and reflection. They form structures capable to undulate and follow sound.
If there’s anything to critique, it’s the volume of the music. The sound design, while immersive, was at times overwhelming, making the few spoken lines nearly impossible to hear. And a handful of moments felt repetitive without justification, particularly the segment featuring the Cheshire Cat, which didn’t quite earn its length.
Jasmin Vardimon doesn’t offer answers, but she does offer space to feel, to reflect, and to remember that life itself is full of thresholds. In her ALiCE, the message is clear: we are all in motion, all moving through wonderlands of our own, and sometimes the most radical thing we can do is keep walking, even when we don’t know what’s on the other side of the door.