Alleyne Dance bring their sharpest instincts to England’s next generation
The body has always kept the score, that much is well-established. But Memory Keepers, the new work by guest artistic directors Kristina and Sadé Alleyne for the National Youth Dance Company, arrives at Sadler’s Wells to remind you how much the body also keeps everything else including the grief, the joy, the smell of your mother’s moisturiser and the feeling of being pulled back to something you’d half decided to forget.
It opens with a single figure on stage, locking and isolating, chest popping, hands slapping against his own body. This one-man percussion section, a person literally striking himself into presence, and the kind of opening that tells you immediately what sort of evening this is going to be, an exciting performance far from a recital or showcase.
The 32 dancers are recruited from across England, and you feel that breadth in the room.. When bodies start pulling and dragging each other onto the stage, it reads less like choreography and more like the way memory actually works: hauled back involuntarily, sometimes by others, sometimes against your will. The piece understands that some memories return whether you send for them or not, and some you have to reach for and still can’t quite grasp and that tension never loosens its hold on the evening.
The costuming sits in a register that is difficult to name precisely, which is exactly right. Big, square trousers and short-sleeved shirts in muds and tawny browns, different coloured legs on the same trousers – uniform but not uniformly so, nude in palette but not in effect, something that feels like a common skin, a shared language among people who still speak in their own accents.
In the darker lighting passages, figures move in from the back of the stage in near-blackout, present but barely visible, like a memory you know is there but cannot quite surface. Breath becomes rhythm, the huffing and puffing of exertion made audible and intentional, which is something hip hop has always understood and the Alleynes use to full effect.
Giuliano Modarelli’s music was developed alongside the movement with that relationship felt in every sequence. A flute solo is the production’s unexpected pieces revealing the cast’s eclectic talents. The narration near the opening reaches for smell: a mother’s moisturiser, something domestic and precise and impossible to replicate in a theatre, and the fact that it almost works is not a failure but entirely the point. There are rare moments of speech scattered through the piece, and the most striking comes when a girl shouts about memory with no microphone, no amplification, her voice simply released into the room and left there.
What the Alleynes have made here, working with and from these 32 young people, is a piece about the complexity of what we carry and what carries us. The bodies on stage do that work in a way that no amount of narration could, athletic and controlled and then suddenly undone and then controlled again, and if you have any interest in what contemporary dance can do when it is trusted to speak in its own language, this is a production that rewards that curiosity generously.
Memory Keepers is on tour in the UK until Thursday 23rd July. Tickets available here.