Ballet Black in A Shadow Work and My Sister, The Serial Killer

Hackney Empire, London March 2025

In Judith Jamison’s autobiography, Dancing Spirit, America’s most revered Black modern dancer recorded her thoughts about performing Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, which is now a landmark of Black culture. “You try it sometime,” she wrote. “The dancers made the movement look easy. It’s not. It takes unbelievable coordination. It takes passion, commitment, dedication, and love to know that every step you do should be infused with 100 percent of yourself.”

In 2001, nearly 40 years after Ailey choreographed that piece for the company he had recently established to display the Black experience through dance, Cassa Pancho founded Ballet Black in London. By then, artists of color were appearing regularly in contemporary dance, but ballet had not welcomed them so enthusiastically. Sticking to her motto, “Change Not Trend,” Pancho made a home for Black and Asian ballet dancers, a platform not only for performers but for the students in her Ballet Black Junior School, who would discover role models in the artists and teachers.

She avoided one trend by rejecting the common practice of most larger ballet companies. Instead of building Ballet Black’s repertory from the 19th-century narratives or well-known ballets of the 20th century, she repeatedly broke unexplored ground by searching out new work. To date, she has commissioned more than 60 original pieces from more than 40 dancemakers, ranging from Richard Alston and Shobana Jeyasingh to Will Tuckett, Gregory Maqoma and Javier de Frutos.

Ballet Black’s new double bill, presented in London for only three performances, attracted a large Black audience that seldom appears at the ballet. Yet because Pancho’s priorities differ significantly from Ailey’s, neither piece drew on a shared heritage or celebrated African or Asian customs.

As both director and choreographer, Pancho based My Sister, The Serial Killer on the eponymous, best-selling novel by Oyinkan Braithwaite, who is Nigerian. Chanel DaSilva took her inspiration for A Shadow Work from Jung’s theory of the “shadow self.” Emerging from widely different cultures, both sources address universal behavior without racial or ethnic references.

DaSilva singles out one woman, gleaming in a white dress, as the symbol of everyone who tries to confront the deeply suppressed aspects of their nature. The “shadow self” represents the buried parts of each individual personality—Jung called it “the thing a person has no wish to be”—which must be integrated for anyone to accept his whole self.

In DaSilva’s expert hands, the ballet hinges on the transfer of a closed cardboard box between the reluctant woman and a quietly insistent man and chorus. The quivering of Taraja Hudson’s fist over her heart relayed her fear; the massed shadows, led with authority by Acaoã de Castro, surged around her in relentless waves, flowing across the floor, flying overhead.

As the couple passed the box between them in absolute silence, the long diagonal sequence captured the taut push and pull of their stubborn struggle. Her eventual acceptance of the box and its secrets seemed inevitable, and her resistance fell away in the haunting image of resignation that closed the piece.

Flipped into modern drama by My Sister, The Serial Killer, the company tore avidly into the grisly tale of willful murder and seduction, miming as much as they danced and mining the story’s humor as well as its horror. Even when the man she loves becomes a victim, Korede serves as an accomplice to her reckless sister, cleaning up the bodies and blood Ayoola leaves in the wake of her many romances,

Duty and desire war within Korede—would you protect your sister or your lover?—as Pancho pushes the mayhem from bedroom to hospital to a lively party. Neither love nor lies carries much emotional weight in this choreography, and I longed for more expressive dancing to replace all the realistic gesturing. But the company threw itself wholeheartedly into the lurid fun, acting with the same conviction that permeated the dancing, and the audience shouted its satisfaction.

See balletblack.co.uk for tour dates until July.