FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN
Sadler’s Wells Theatre
★★★★
“demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to the relationship between movement, music and scenography”
Music arrives before the dancers. As Mahler’s Fifth Symphony begins, a red curtain gives way to a figure draped in translucent fabric. Twelve dancers gradually gather, disperse and reassemble. The opening proposes no characters or plot; instead, it establishes the central question of Emanuel Gat’s FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN: how can movement, light and sound generate dramaturgy without conventional narrative?
Following its premiere at Montpellier Danse in June 2026, the work draws on a symphony composed in 1901–02, Mahler’s near-fatal haemorrhage and his encounter with Alma Schindler. His Fifth marked a departure from the vocal and literary elements of his earlier symphonies towards a purely instrumental architecture. Gat’s choreographic approach is similarly resistant to illustration. Rather than translating music into movement, he allows independent compositional systems to coexist, occasionally converging and at other times contradicting one another.
Light emerges as the production’s most articulate dramaturgical agent. The stage resembles a horizontal scroll, repeatedly divided and redrawn by illumination. Twelve bodies form temporary constellations, only to be isolated by sudden changes in visibility. Gat, who designs the lighting himself, gives it an independent temporal structure alongside movement and music. What unfolds is less a succession of danced images than a negotiation over what can be seen, concealed or remembered.
The choreography of visibility becomes a dramaturgy of perception.
Costume (VICHER) deepens this process. Flowing translucent fabrics initially dissolve the boundaries between skin, movement and air. As contemporary clothing gradually appears, the dancers acquire more recognisable, everyday identities. The transformation suggests a passage from an almost primordial collective towards the differentiated bodies of modern life. Their eventual return to the opening garments establishes a circular structure, although repetition now carries the memory of intervening transformations.
In the third section, the withdrawal of sound alters the experience of watching the body. Without music to organise movement, gestures appear strangely magnified. Every extension, contraction and pause becomes exposed, allowing physical presence to resist absorption into a larger musical structure.
The fourth chapter produces some of the evening’s most compelling imagery. Through lighting, the dancers become silhouettes, recalling prehistoric figures or fragments of collective memory. Children’s voices mingle with sounds suggestive of explosions or fireworks. Celebration and destruction become difficult to distinguish. As the silhouettes develop into human crowds, the dancers appear to rush into a sea of fire.
These images evoke historical and political associations without specifying an event. Their significance lies in their ambiguity: the same collective body may suggest coexistence, vulnerability or catastrophe, depending on how light and sound reorganise its appearance.
Gat’s dramaturgy is most convincing when meaning emerges through these shifts in perception rather than through predetermined symbolism.
Nevertheless, the treatment of absence is less consistently resolved. The final presentation of twelve individual bodies in near-silence creates an intimate encounter with physical presence. By contrast, repeated intervals of silence behind the curtain occasionally interrupt the performance’s momentum without establishing an equally compelling temporal experience.
Silence and emptiness possess dramaturgical potential, but their effectiveness depends on rhythm, anticipation and duration. Here, certain pauses function more as transitions between visual compositions than as meaningful events themselves.
FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to the relationship between movement, music and scenography. Its most successful moments reveal how theatrical meaning can arise not from narrative, but from the conditions through which bodies become perceptible.
FIVE DAYS IN THE SUN
Sadler’s Wells Theatre
Reviewed on 3rd November 2026
by Portia Yuran Li
Photography by Julia Gat
