Marking Time delivers three fiercely distinct visions of how sound and movement bend, stretch, and disrupt our sense of time.
Earlier this year, I saw Outlander at Kings Place and was fascinated by the musical chemistry between Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon. The Only Tune has lived rent-free in my head ever since. So when I heard that Marking Time at Sadler’s Wells would bring their world into the realm of dance, I was genuinely excited to see how movement might deepen and disrupt what I thought I already knew about the piece.
Muhly’s own words capture the promise of the evening: “Dance makes you experience time in a completely different way than in a concert hall.” And the title “Marking Time” itself seems to play on that very idea: not just tracking moments as they pass, but tracing how time can be felt, stretched, broken, replayed, remade through sound and motion.
The structure of the show is clean yet deeply layered: three pieces, three choreographers, three distinct ways of mixing sound with movement.
First up is Slant by Jules Cunningham, set to Muhly’s piece Drones. Here time doesn’t feel linear at all. There is no story you can follow; instead, sound and movement appear disjointed, disorientated. The dancers’ technical precision is counterbalanced by their sense of being lost. A length of string used as a prop at the beginning, seemingly meant to hold things together, ends up in a tangled bundle on the floor, impossible to untangle. That ambiguity of time, movement and rhythm felt compelling to me.
The second piece, Veins of Water by Maud Le Pladec, felt like a metamorphosis of the string motif: that tangled line becomes fluid, turning into the “veins of water” that carry the descent of the audience into a form of katabasis. The dancers moved with sinuous grace, their limbs and torsos sweeping like currents, echoing Muhly’s score. Here the narrative felt fluid, less fragmented, but still retaining that under-current of grief I experienced during the first piece. Lighting by Eric Soyet is integral throughout, weaving with movement and sound to create “dance shadows” , to play with perspective and particularly in the final moments, where the stage becomes a kind of cinematic space, recalling the era of 1920s film.
And then came the part I had been quietly anticipating all evening: a new incarnation of The Only Tune, shaped by the unlikely but electrifying triangle of Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, and Michael Keegan-Dolan. Each of the three brings a distinct artistic lineage. Amidon channels the voice of the past, his delivery carrying the grit and fragility of the old storytellers who first whispered these ballads. Muhly, in contrast, operates like a modern sound architect, dismantling the ballad’s old structure and rebuilding it into layered sound worlds where memory, distortion and emotional residue coexist. And Keegan-Dolan, with his blend of ritual, irreverence and theatrical instinct, slips into the cracks between them, conjuring a movement language that feels half myth, half trickster.
The dancers, clad in skeletal costumes, move with a mixture of menace and mischief, revealing the strange truth at the heart of murder ballads: that these grim narratives were always meant to thrill as much as to chill. Scratches, growls, sudden exhalations and the thud of feet become part of the score. Sam Amidon stands on a chair, a rope dangling above him, as he recounts the tale of jealous sisters and the miller’s grisly handiwork. The staging exposes the grotesque humour buried inside the story.
The string returns here in a new guise, a symbol of something eternal: a “no-time” thread running through the story’s violence, perhaps even the unbroken line between life and death that the ballad gestures toward.
The musicians of the Britten Sinfonia provided an extraordinary live texture around the action embodying what it means for tradition to be not merely inherited, but actively reimagined in real time.
In the end, Marking Time felt less like a programme of three separate works and more like a single, shifting inquiry into what time does to sound, to bodies, and to stories. Across disorientation, fluidity, and the wild theatricality of The Only Tune, the evening revealed how music and movement can fracture time, loop it, distort it, and sometimes even stop it.