Now by Jasmin Vardimon

Sadler’s Wells East March 2025

In Britain, where many people still believe that dance and ballet mean exactly the same thing, modern dance companies come and go regularly. Certain names hit the news, then fade away for any number of reasons. The money may run out, the dancers or their choreographer may find greater challenges or security elsewhere, the audience may not come.

But some survive and even flourish. Matthew Bourne’s acclaimed New Adventures grew from a tiny experimental group, Adventures in Motion Pictures, that he organized in 1987. In 2000, two principal artists left the Royal Ballet to establish an all-male company, BalletBoyz, that is still going strong.

Jasmin Vardimon’s ensemble has had the same enduring success, planting itself firmly in the British contemporary dance scene as well as graduate education and widely welcomed internationally.

Born in Israel and trained there in gymnastics and athletics before she took up dance, Vardimon came to Europe in 1995 after winning the British Council’s “On the Way to London” award for choreography. Having founded her company two years later, she gradually developed a choreographic style that fused movement, words and technology into dance theatre for the specific purpose of storytelling.

Now housed in Kent in the custom-made JV H.O.M.E., the troupe devotes its new space to creation, classes, workshops and to preparing young artists to realize “the dialogue between dance and theatre” professionally.

Now is also the title of the piece Vardimon has made to celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary, and it cleverly includes her ‘“then.” Binding together sections of her earlier dances with fresh material, she has crafted an engaging work that shows her strengths, her interests, and her dancers in fascinating combinations.

You didn’t have to identify the original sources to spot her focus on political activity and its fierce repression. Suspended in darkness, two figures waved white flags in rhythmic patterns—protesting? surrendering?—until workers wearing hard hats, with Now and Then printed on their hi-vis jackets, stopped them mid-move and carried them off.

Against a projected image of electricity pylons and barbed wire, a single man confronted a cadre of implacable guards who blocked his escape robotically, whipping at his body with whistling flags as if beating him. Shoulder to shoulder, they braided their arms into a chainlink fence; a roving spotlight pursued him; the rope he tried to grasp slithered from his hands.

That rope created magic too. Lying flat on the floor, it became a tightrope that the dancers crossed, also lying flat on the floor but with their precarious progress captured by an overhead camera whose eye alone deciphered their squirming.

Sometimes the camera duplicated the action head-on, throwing a dance, enormously magnified, onto the rear wall as the dancer performed it. Sometimes the camera tricked our senses; laid flat on the stage in even zigzags, the rope acquired solidity on the back wall, where we saw the hard-hats climb it like a staircase beneath a sign pointing toward Happiness. With one tug on the rope, their footing vanished as the stairs flattened into a slide.

Movement and drama were inextricably linked when a couple with a wide elastic tether wrapped around both their waists struggled to separate. The power shifted between them as each partner took command in turn, pulling closer and pulling away.

But love informed Now as thoroughly as conflict and violence. Sitting down, one couple shaped a seductive duet from their gently floating limbs; another pair converted a series of melting backbends into a vision of yielding sensuality.

Vardimon’s involvement with text and spatial illusion brings both humor and emotional depth to the theatricality of her work. But the dancing in her compelling choreography, often in unison, always in unexpected configurations, proves even more hypnotic and sustains our imagination all by itself.

See jasminvardimon.com for UK tour dates through May.