While the dance captivates, the argument it seeks to make never entirely lands.
Shobana Jeyasingh’s We Caliban, now playing at Sadler’s Wells East, arrives with a bold proposition: to revisit Shakespeare’s The Tempest through a postcolonial lens, centring Caliban not as monster or curiosity, but as the dispossessed native body shaped and constrained by imperial power. It is an intellectually ambitious premise, one that seeks to expose inherited hierarchies and interrogate the structures of culture, education and domination.
Whether that premise fully convinces is another matter.
The production’s central gesture appears to be the opposition of forms: European ballet and courtly discipline set against freer, earthier, more expansive movement languages associated with Caliban’s island world. The intention is to dramatise the tensions between coloniser and colonised through the body itself. Yet at times, the idea feels somewhat imposed upon Shakespeare rather than organically drawn from it. If only the complexities of postcolonial history could be resolved so neatly by placing one dance vocabulary against another. The binaries occasionally risk becoming too schematic, reducing layered political questions into visual shorthand.
Still, where the work speaks most eloquently is through movement. Jeyasingh’s choreography is frequently exquisite, and the dancers perform with remarkable precision and fluid intelligence. In the opening island sequences, the stage breathes with a sense of connection, rhythm and shared joy. Bodies fold, spiral and surge across the space with communal ease, creating an environment governed less by hierarchy than by instinctive relation. There is warmth here, and a sensual sense of grounded freedom.
This is sharply contrasted with the Milan court. Suddenly, lines become stricter, balances formal, posture upright and controlled. Balletic rigour becomes a language of order and ownership. The contrast may be conceptually blunt, but visually it is striking.
A central duet provides the evening’s most compelling dramatic tension. Charged with near-sexual intensity, it becomes a study in desire, control and mutual testing. One senses not simply attraction but possession, like the unsettling echo of a Pygmalion impulse, the urge to “educate” another to shape and own them.
By the final section, Prospero and Miranda have gone, yet Caliban’s movement has changed. The once-fluid physical language now bears traces of European formality, suggesting colonisation’s deepest legacy lies not in occupation but internal transformation. It is one of the production’s most resonant ideas.
Less successful are the spoken texts and voice-overs threaded throughout. They often feel overdetermined, distracting from choreography strong enough to carry meaning unaided. Rather than clarifying the themes, they sometimes clutter them.
The lighting, however, is beautifully judged. It subtly transforms the stage from sunlit island openness to the cooler architecture of Milanese court life, shaping atmosphere with elegant restraint.
What remains, finally, is admiration for the dancing and respect for the ambition, coupled with some doubt about the conceptual frame. We Caliban is visually rich, physically superb and undeniably thoughtful. Yet while the dance often captivates, the argument it seeks to make never entirely lands.