VOLLMOND

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★★★

“an exhilarating experience”

Vollmond, first premiered by Pina Bausch and her company Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2006, returns to Sadlers Wells in 2025. It is a welcome revival, following in the footsteps of the 2024 revival of Nelken. Once again, the Company assembles on stage to show us the essence of “tanztheater”—a unique creation of movement and dance that is Pina Bausch’ signature contribution to the world of dance. Beautifully costumed (design by Marion Cito), the dancers navigate Peter Pabst’s extraordinary set design. Vollmond is a wonderful, if often unsettling, way to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Vollmond—the word means “full moon” in German—is a dance about emotions often associated with this particular phase of the moon. The emotion of love is a big theme in this show but it’s complex and often ironic. As everyone knows, full moons also have a particular association with high tides. It’s no surprise then, to find that water figures prominently in the show. Lots and lots of water. What Pina Bausch’s dancers do with that water, and how water gradually takes over Peter Pabst’s deceptively simple set is what surprises.

The work begins with dancers entering the space in pairs to make their moves on one another. Water is present, or rather absent, right from the start. Armed with empty water bottles, the dancers begin by making sounds by flinging the bottles about. Bottles are replaced with staves, and before we quite know it, we are in the middle of battles between various couples who court by confrontation. They push each other across the stage with kisses, or shake each other by the shoulders or the hair. They pour water into glasses, and then pour it out on each other. Water begins as a gentle rain falling from above. It flows as a shallow river gradually revealed that the dancers can swim in. By the end of the show, the rain has become an overwhelming torrent that drenches everything, including a vast boulder that looks as though it could outlast time itself. But as we know, water outlasts rock. And the emotions represented by all this water are somehow greater and longer lasting than the humans pushed and pulled by them.

It is inevitable that the dancers get wet. Nevertheless, they take an often childlike delight in the experience of being drenched—and drenching each other—that develops into a full scale water fight by the end of the show. And Pina Bausch focuses our attention on the way in which water changes the bodies that come into contact with it, and the costumes the dancers are wearing. Water ebbs and flows and we are caught up in the crazy beauty of it all.

What differentiates Vollmond from the earlier Nelken and its field of carnations, is that while carnations can be trampled and the dance space reclaimed for the dancers that inhabit it, the space here cannot. The dancers can only find ways to negotiate around and on that boulder, and in and on that water. The dance is this space is technically dangerous, and the dancers must navigate with care. It’s a fitting metaphor for the emotions that love—and full moons—produce. There is something deeply authentic about watching dancers play and struggle under the blazing lights that echo days and nights passing in a variety of seasons.

Vollmond is a less layered and ironic a show than Nelken perhaps, but it still demands the full attention of the audience. It is a piece focused on pairs of dancers, and long solos. Only once does the company assemble on stage for a moment in which all the dancers move in unison. With the music of Amon Tobin, the Balanescu Quartet, Cat Power, Carl Craig, June Miyake, Magyar Posse, Nenad Jelíc, René Aubry, and Tom Waits, the sound is as eclectic as its dance. An evening with Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal is an exhilarating experience, even if your imagination and your emotions go into overload and you end up as exhausted as the dancers. Unmissable.

VOLLMOND

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 14th February 2025

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Martin Argyroglo

Recently reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

DIMANCHE | ★★★★ | January 2025

SONGS OF THE WAYFARER | ★★★★ | December 2024

NOBODADDY (TRÍD AN BPOLL GAN BUN) | ★★★★ | November 2024

THE SNOWMAN | ★★★★ | November 2024

EXIT ABOVE | ★★★★ | November 2024

ΑΓΡΙΜΙ (FAUVE) | ★★★ | October 2024

STORIES – THE TAP DANCE SENSATION | ★★★★★ | October 2024

FRONTIERS: CHOREOGRAPHERS OF CANADA | ★★★★ | October 2024

TUTU | ★★★ | October 2024

CARMEN | ★★★★ | July 2024

THE OPERA LOCOS | ★★★★ | May 2024

ASSEMBLY HALL | ★★★★★ | March 2024

VOLLMOND

ANIMAL FARM

Stratford East

★★★★

“some truly striking moments of grand theatricality”

First things first, there is no farm. Not one that we would recognise anyway. Not the solace of a green field or a puffy cloud against an azure sky. This Animal Farm is a factory farm. A gutter scythes through the stage running red with the blood of slaughtered animals.

In director Amy Leach’s powerful and visually stunning interpretation of the George Orwell novella, the world is a succession of wire cages. These animals’ lives are bloody, mucky and constrained.

Set and costume designer Hayley Grindle dresses the animals in smeared vests and boiler suits, their designation (Sheep, Dog etc) tattooed or worn as patches – and where have we seen that before?

Old Major (Everal A Walsh) warns his friends they are sleepwalking towards their own destruction. He too is carried off to the abattoir but his final cry for rebellion finds purchase and revolution follows.

In many of the beautifully worked set pieces – brutal, sinewy ballets – the look and feel is that of a Kraftwerk gig, all soulless electronica, wire and concrete picked out in red and white with starkly lit bodies as silhouettes in strobe-like slow motion.

It is against this backdrop of warehouse columns and ominous shadows that the menagerie fights for scraps of dignity, putting the agro into agro-industrial complex.

“Hambush!’ coos gossipy pigeon and part-time narrator Milo (Em Prendergast), who adds necessary comic relief to a relentlessly grim tale.

Snowball (Robin Morrissey) and Napoleon (Tachia Newall) square off in a battle of ideals. Sneaky little Squealer (Tom Simper) sows the seeds of distrust and watches his manipulations infect the mind of bombastic Napoleon who succumbs to paranoia and corruption.

Tatty Hennessy’s muscular adaptation – accessible through seamless British Sign Language – is never less than ambitious in its manifesto and purpose.

A banner reads “All animals are created equal.” Over the course of two hours the declaration becomes first an ideal, then a plan, then a provocation, then an anathema and finally a fig leaf to justify oppression. Some animals are more equal than others, Orwell reminds us.

Caught up in the crossfire is a vibrant selection of characters each given their own personalities mercifully free of nursery rhyme cliché. Clover (Tianah Hodding) is frustratingly naïve, Boxer (Gabriel Paul) hard working, Minty (Farshid Rokey) malleable, Clara (Brydie Service) maternal, Blue (Joshua-Alexander Williams) vicious and so on.

It is a truism that Orwell’s response to the Soviet Union is perennially relevant, even in its 80th anniversary year (which accounts for a high crop yield of productions recently). As a result, there is an occasional over-elaboration of message infecting a script which, otherwise, demonstrates effectively how division is a design flaw of the human soul.

There is another box, which sits above the stage, drenched in luxury. First the greedy farmers look down on the animals and then the animals look down on the lesser animals, watching them writhe in their own muck, this time out of deluded sense of community and joint endeavour.

Inevitably, characters become less distinctive as the end nears but the impressive cast holds out for as long as it can before surrendering to the needs of allegory.

Meanwhile, in this committed and sure-footed production, the slow descent into bleakness is marked out by some truly striking moments of grand theatricality.

VOLLMOND

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★★★

“an exhilarating experience”

VOLLMOND

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 14th February 2025

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Martin Argyroglo

Recently reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

VOLLMOND

VOLLMOND

VOLLMOND

ANIMAL FARM

Stratford East

★★★★

“some truly striking moments of grand theatricality”

ANIMAL FARM

Stratford East

Reviewed on 13th February 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Kirsten McTernan

Previously reviewed at this venue:

ANIMAL FARM

ANIMAL FARM

ANIMAL FARM