An uneven double bill redeemed – and ultimately dominated – by a brilliant and macabre second act.
Ballet Black: SHADOWS is a production split cleanly down the middle – two halves, two sharply contrasting moods. It’s an evening that begins tentatively and ends in gleeful, macabre triumph.
The opening piece, Shadow Work by Chanel DaSilva, is rooted in the choreographer’s own emotional healing journey in therapy exploring the titular technique. Built as a sequence of vignettes, a woman unboxes her ‘shadow parts’, encountering fragments of family, memory and pain, yet as a whole the piece feels ungrounded and slightly elusive. Some images land: a striking and slightly sinister family tableau which implies an unloving father figure; a few beautifully weighted lifts; moments of genuine electricity in the group work. But the ensemble’s execution often lacks cohesion, and it feels like the vignettes arrive, impress briefly, then disappear without building towards some form of escalation.
At the centre, however, stands Taraja Hudson, luminous in white as the woman confronting her internal multiplicity. Her presence gives the piece its strongest anchor – elegant, expressive and unmistakably in command of the stage. Still, despite her performance, I left thinking I’d missed something. It feels, at times, not only abstract but loose and under-rehearsed.
Then comes the second half – and what a second half.
Adapted from Oyinkan Braithwaite’s best-selling novel My Sister, the Serial Killer, this piece is vivid, playful and delightfully dark, a choreographic thriller with a wicked pulse. The style is sharp, the storytelling confident, and the dancers energised. Helga Paris-Morales is irresistibly charismatic as Ayoola, the titular younger sister whose trail of dead boyfriends has become an inconvenient family habit. Isabela Coracy’s Korede is her perfect counterweight: steady, wary, devoted.
The production’s design elements come alive here. The murdered boyfriends – ghostly figures in suits with black bags over their heads – crawl, writhe and jerk across the stage like a grim chorus haunting Korede’s nightmares. Their presence, reminiscent of Giselle’s spectral Wilis, adds a horrific theatrical flourish. The choreography navigates playfulness and menace with ease.
The music is an immediate joy; a blend of original score with tracks from Toots & the Maytals, Fela Kuti and more, lending the piece a rhythmic buoyancy that the dancers ride with infectious precision (I smiled when many audience members started nodding along with the dancers, instantly recognising those well-loved songs).
SHADOWS may be a show of two halves, but its second act is so confidently realised, so stylish, strange and satisfying, that it lingers long after the first has faded. If Shadow Work feels like a piece still excavating its meaning, My Sister, the Serial Killer arrives fully formed – a witty, unsettling and compelling slice of dance theatre that showcases Ballet Black at its most alive.