Twice-Born by Scottish Ballet

Sadler’s Wells Theatre London March 2025

You don’t often leave a performance worrying about the company you’ve just seen, but I’m definitely worried about Scottish Ballet.

The last time that company visited London it brought us Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s steamy interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire. On the previous visit, it showed off Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright’s sharply updated version of Coppélia. Packed with solid choreographic ideas and even better dancing, both programs encouraged viewers to return at the first opportunity for whatever the company would produce next.

If you followed that impulse, however, you’d have been disappointed this time around. For one thing, the program titled “Twice-Born” started with a film, Dive, created in 2021 by Sophie Laplane who danced with this company for 13 years before becoming its resident choreographer. Said to be inspired by the artist Yves Klein, the film concentrated on color and tricksy photography rather than movement, but it did feature some striking stop-action poses and a llama.

Because it began the program without warning, I felt like the impresario in The Red Shoes, who comments that when he’s invited to a party, he doesn’t expect to find himself at an audition. Scottish Ballet may have intended the film as a bonus for the viewers—and some of them may have taken it that way—but honestly, anyone who wants to see dancers on the screen could stay home. Once you pay to attend a live performance, you might appreciate getting what you paid for.

OK, on with the show. First up after the film, a short slick piece by Cayetano Soto called Schachmatt, which means ‘checkmate.’ Rendered interchangeable by unisex costumes—gray shorts and shirts, black knee socks and soft shoes—its ten dancers wriggled identically through a jazzy vocabulary of tipped hats, splayed hands and jutting hips.

Racing across the checkerboard floor at top speed in an evident imitation of Bob Fosse’s cool, slightly kinky style, they seemed as impersonal as hookers, glazed by the habit of strutting their stuff. If they were opponents or playing any kind of game, they shared that sense of competition only with each other.

As they pushed sexual coyness to the brink of camp, my guest declared, “They look like dancers on TV or in an advertisement.” Too obvious for today’s variety shows and too old-fashioned to be provocative, the choreography seemed no more than an assembly line for stock gestures, polished by someone else, that the dancers’ energy alone could slot into place.

Dickson Mbi’s Twice-Born, which completed the program, does them a greater disservice by using their bodies merely to illustrate rhythm. Mbi has said, “It tells the journey of a matriarch leaving her community and a young person coming of age.”

I could spot the two women, isolated from the crowd and often standing still, and the elaborate group rituals surrounding their private emotions. Most of the movement lay in the massed dancers’ rippling arms and flexing backs, muscularity compounded by a pounding beat to evoke a primitive atmosphere.

But for long moments, nothing at all happened. One soloist, immobile, stared at us as if paralyzed. The mob crawled through the darkness or stood in place, rocking gently from foot to foot and breathing together like a single organism. Having eluded the gigantic rocks that dropped from above, the ensemble stacked them around the stage.

Unable to distinguish any dramatic arc, the audience applauded several times as blackouts halted the action. What does it mean if you can’t tell when a dance ends? Why cast dancers as percussion instruments and scene shifters, and why limit our focus to their arms and torsos when their legs and feet can be just as expressive?

Maybe the company’s director, Christopher Hampson, suffers from FOMO, the fear of missing out. While this program flaunts some hip styles that might attract new viewers, they’ll miss the chance to see dance and dancers that could hook them for life.

In Scotland, The Crucible tours April 17-May 24. Sophie Laplane’s Mary, Queen of Scots tours September 17-October 4, following its première at the Edinburgh International Festival on August 15. scottishballet.co.uk