Phoenix Dance Theatre are simply, technically, one of the best companies working in Britain today
A mixed bill lives or dies by its pacing, and Interplay, Phoenix Dance Theatre’s 2026 touring programme, largely gets it right, assembling four works that are distinct enough to surprise and related enough to cohere. The evening is about connection: how it forms, what it costs, and what happens in the room when it quietly stops working, and it makes its argument almost entirely through pairs, the duet functioning not just as a choreographic form but as the show’s central thesis.
It opens with Next of Kin, Marcus Jarrell Willis’s duet for Dorna Ashory and Dylan Springer, a piece of playful sibling energy that establishes the company’s technical calibre without overstaying its welcome. It is warm and well-executed, and it does what an opening piece should by waking you up and making you lean forward. That it does not linger long is, in this case, a virtue.
Ed Myhill’s Why Are People Clapping?!, restaged by Camille Giraudeau and set to Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, is the evening’s most inventive offering. This piece that finds rhythm in tennis matches, facial expressions and the body’s own percussive possibilities, performed by Ashory, Graciela Mariqueo-Smith, Yasmina Patel, Tony Polo, and Springer, never sacrificing joy for its own sake. The section built almost entirely from facial and head movement alone toes a line between grotesque and funny. It is the kind of work that makes you feel dance is being discovered rather than demonstrated.
Small Talk, choreographed by Pett Clausen-Knight and performed by Aaron Chaplin and Hannah McGlashon, is the programme’s most ambitious piece, a portrait of a relationship declining by degrees, set in a domestic space of chair, lamp, and rug, and scored with the kind of classical music that contemporary dance has been reaching for since the early 2000s. Chaplin and McGlashon are technically superb, and there are moments of real ache in the choreography, particularly in how stillness is used as a form of argument. But the piece outstays itself, pressing its point with a thoroughness that edges toward the airless, and the musical choices, culminating in Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, which has appeared in so many contemporary dance pieces it has begun to feel less like a choice and more like a reflex, do it no favours. We understand the relationship is failing. We understood some time ago.
The second act belongs entirely to Suite Release, a fifty-minute ensemble work co-choreographed by Yusha-Marie Sorzano and Willis that draws on hip-hop and house culture, the communal spaces those forms created, and what it means to move together when the world outside keeps complicating the impulse. It should, on paper, risk feeling long, but it does not. The nine-strong company, Ashory, Chaplin, Rory Clarke, Phikolwethu Luke, Mariqueo-Smith, McGlashon, Patel, Polo, and Springer, fill the stage with an energy that is almost aggressively alive, shifting between lyricism and full-bodied release with a fluency that makes the transitions feel inevitable rather than managed. The 1990s references are worn lightly enough that they never tip into nostalgia for its own sake; this is less about looking back than about asking what was lost and whether it is recoverable.
Phoenix Dance Theatre are a company that know how to inhabit a stage, and Interplay is a confident demonstration of what that looks like across four very different registers. Not everything lands with equal force, but the evening as a whole makes a persuasive case for the mixed bill as a form, and for this company as one of the more interesting things happening in British contemporary dance right now.
Interplay runs at Sadler’s Wells East, London until 27th June. Tickets here.