Returning after their sell-out hit ∞ {Infinite} in 2025, Vortex is performed by the international powerhouse HUMANHOOD, where the stage becomes the ‘eye of the tornado.’ We sat down with Julia and Rudi to discuss their upcoming performance.
VORTEX runs from 10-14th November at Sadlers Wells East – Tickets are available here.
VORTEX explores how we can access hidden reserves of resilience amid chaos; what inspired you to explore this idea through movement?
VORTEX began with our fascination with the tornado: an immense force of chaos that paradoxically contains a point of stillness at its centre. That image felt deeply connected to the human experience. We cannot always control what happens around us, but we can explore how we meet it.
Through movement, we became interested in resilience not as resistance or hardness, but as adaptability — the capacity to remain responsive when everything around us is shifting. The dancers move through intense physical states and turbulence, but rather than fighting those forces, they learn to move with and through them. VORTEX asks whether strength might sometimes come not from holding tighter, but from releasing control and discovering the stillness that can exist within movement.
HUMANHOOD asks what becomes possible when we stop controlling the body and start listening to it; how has this philosophy shaped your choreographic approach?
This has fundamentally shaped the way we create. Rather than beginning with what movement should look like, we often begin by asking what the body is receiving: gravity, rhythm, another person, space, breath or an internal impulse.
Our role as choreographers is not only to construct movement, but to create the conditions in which movement can emerge. Our work is highly choreographed and physically precise, but within that structure we want the dancers to remain alive and responsive rather than simply reproducing form. Listening changes the quality of movement. The body becomes less about executing and more about responding. For us, this creates something deeply human onstage: individual bodies experiencing the same choreography, while each remains genuinely present within it.
The stage becomes the ‘eye of the tornado’, placing the audience at the centre of a powerful physical experience; how did you translate this concept into the movement, sound and lighting?
We wanted VORTEX to be experienced almost as a force rather than simply watched as choreography. The tornado became a compositional principle across the entire production.
Movement travels between turbulence and stillness, with bodies spiralling, gathering, dispersing and being pulled into different physical currents. Iain Armstrong’s sound world surrounds this with layers of rhythm, vibration and intensity, while the lighting transforms the stage into an environment that can feel vast one moment and intensely concentrated the next.
All these elements orbit the same idea: a vortex contains tremendous activity around its centre, yet its eye can hold extraordinary stillness. We wanted the theatre itself to embody that contradiction, inviting the audience not simply to observe the storm, but to enter its centre with us.
Your work draws on field research and cultural collaboration, particularly with artists and elders in East Asia; how have these encounters influenced VORTEX and your wider movement language?
Travel and cultural exchange have been important parts of our development. We’ve spent time with artists, teachers and elders across different cultures, particularly in Asia and South America, encountering different perspectives on the body, nature and human experience.
What has stayed with us is not a particular practice that we have taken and placed into our choreography, but the questions these encounters opened. Our research has always been part of a wider search for truth and for what connects us beneath different cultural frameworks. These experiences encouraged us to question our assumptions and listen more deeply. In VORTEX, this manifests through the body: surrender and resistance, chaos and stillness, individuality and collective movement — experiences that ultimately speak to something we share as human beings.
HUMANHOOD brings together physicality and spirituality; how do you balance these elements to create work that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant?
For us, the two have never felt separate. The body is where we experience life, so when we explore questions that might be described as spiritual, we begin with something tangible and physical.
These questions have taken us on a profound journey of discovery and, at times, revelation. Our search for truth has transformed us personally, and what we discover naturally finds its way into our work. But we are not interested in telling an audience what to believe. Instead, choreography becomes a space to explore questions of meaning, connection and our place within something greater than ourselves, while leaving room for each person to encounter the work through their own experience.
Following the success of ∞ at Sadler’s Wells East, what do you hope audiences experience or discover about themselves through VORTEX?
∞ invited audiences into a very particular world, and returning to Sadler’s Wells East with VORTEX feels like an opportunity to take that journey somewhere more visceral.
We hope audiences experience VORTEX physically before trying to understand it intellectually. There is something powerful about witnessing bodies move through intensity, instability and exhaustion while continually finding another way forward. At its heart, VORTEX asks what remains when the things we rely upon feel uncertain. We hope people leave with a sense that resilience does not necessarily mean becoming harder or controlling more. Sometimes it can mean becoming more receptive, adaptable and present — finding the quiet centre from which we can respond to whatever is moving around us.