FCKING FUTURE*

Sadler’s Wells East

★★★★

“a triumphant return to Sadler’s Wells”

The performance space, a square, reflective floor surrounded on all four sides by close seating, falls into complete darkness. A single beat begins, somewhere between a metronome, a sonar and slow pulse of electronic music. As the light gradually rises, eight dancers individually enter the space, introducing a regimented walk-step, a forward and backward rocking march, at once jerky and effortless that forms a basis of the performance and from which emerge more expressive movements as the piece unfolds. Musically the atmosphere expands from that single beat into a techno-heavy score designed by Rui Lima and Sérgio Martins.

The eight performers are Catarina Casqueiro, Eríc Amorim dos Santos, Fábio Krayze, Doisy Bryan, Matias Rocha Moura, Max Makowski and Nala Revlon, alongside the artistic director and choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira. They are dressed simply in loose reflective trousers and a light chainmail top and are intended to be ghosts from a previous century. Their performance is flawless, even in the near stasis of the march they appear effortless, almost gliding through the space. When moments of unison coalesce, they are striking, especially a square formation when, as one, the dancers raise one arm to the side, level with their shoulder and the other directly in front of them, confronting the audience, they make a quarter turn while lowering and swapping their arms, slapping their leg on the change. The result evokes both semaphore signalling and a marching band, underscoring questions of conformity, militarisation, and the structures that shape and inhibit all of us.

This moment encapsulates the narrative of the piece (Marco da Silva Ferreiro with Catarina Miranda and Cristina Planas Leitão): the performers are eight ghosts, the fallen dead from a previous century who died defending a system they did not believe in, at a time in which war was commonplace. Through the marching step, rigid 4×4 pulse of the music and militaristic dress, the piece questions the systems that shape us all, demanding conformity while also providing a language with which to rebel. What is the place for queer and non-white bodies in society, how can we use the tools of repression for liberation, without falling into a fetishism of power, how does eroticism activate and undermine masculinity? How can we fashion the lessons, expectations and constraints of the past into a more liberatory, as-yet-unknown future? These questions implicitly arise from the performance, as the more expressive steps arise from the base of the march, building towards a hopeful, confrontational, and sublimely surprising finale.

The atmosphere is enhanced through the exceptional use of lighting (Teresa Antunes, Rui Monteiro, Marco da Silva Ferreira). At moments, a single ring of blue light scans the floor passing over the dancers, at others a laser bisects the stage. Most effective is the use of the reflecting floor which sometimes produces mirror images of the performers or casts distorted shadows up to the roof spaces, which in themselves are beautiful and contribute to the otherworldliness of the piece.

A slight weakness on the night I saw the production was the chanted section when the dancers state that they are ‘the ghosts that you tried to kill’. I found the delivery of these key lines is a little lost against the musical accompaniment, which feels like a missed opportunity given that it is the only spoken moment of the performance. Despite this, the performance was captivating and the Q&A with Marco da Silva Ferreira was interesting and informative.

In our current moment, where militarism is once again rising and rights for minoritised groups are under attack, F*cking Future is a vital intervention into the dialogue and a triumphant return to Sadler’s Wells by the acclaimed choreographer. Friday night’s performance will be followed by an after event DJ’d by Rui Lima and Sérgio Martins, based on this, it stands to be a great party.

FCKING FUTURE*

Sadler’s Wells East

Reviewed on 4th June 2026

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by João Octávio

FCKING FUTURE*

★★★★

“Hilarious, moving and heartbreaking”

Despite being interested in classical music, I went into this performance knowing almost nothing about Wolfgang Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna ‘Nanneri’ Mozart—the titular ‘other’ Mozart-—a historical elision that creator, writer and performer Sylvia Milo’s striking and innovative work seeks to address.

In the form of a dramatic monologue, The Other Mozart narrates the life of Nanneri, from her early years as child prodigy born to a musical family in Saltzberg, then performing alongside her brother across Europe, through her teenage years as she is gradually sidelined and eventually left at home while her brother travels the continent, and finally as she is married to a baron living in an isolated castle. She ends her life orphaned and without her brother, returning to Salzberg to give music lessons.

This arc is performed wonderfully by Milo, who is totally engaging as the frustrated but still proud ‘talented’ sister to the ‘genius’ brother. Funny as a child, playing both the joy and annoyance of the older sister of a precocious younger brother, she becomes deeply moving in the pain of thwarted ambition. Throughout, she moves beautifully, aided by director Isaac Byrne and period movement director Janice Orlandi, a hilarious highlight being her mimed promenade with tall hair and a walking stick as she returns from fashionable Vienna to become the talk of the town in the relative backwater of Salzberg.

The staging reflects the originality of piece. An eighteen-foot dress with a spidery bodice sits erect at the centre of the space, its skirt scattered with musical scores, reviews of the siblings’ performances, and letters from Nanneri’s family, which she reads aloud or tosses away depending on their content – often she does both. The bodice is an ingenious piece of staging and costume design (by Magdalena Dąbrowska and Miodrag Guberinic). It sits there from Nanneri’s relatively free youth, a foreboding reminder of the constraints that bound non-noble women in eighteenth-century Europe, both sartorially and societally: despite her prodigious talent there is no suggestion that Nanneri will be able to follow her brother into a career in performance and the bodice constantly underscores that reality. When, following her marriage, she finally puts it on, it is a devastating moment. Nanneri’s taking up the restrictive dress of marriage is accompanied by a horrifying mechanical creaking and wrenching — a standout example of the excellent sound design by Nathan Davis—reflecting the rigidity and inescapability of roles available to women at the time.

The lighting (Joshua Rose) is stellar, picking out Milo in colour, casting her shadow onto the rear wall and fading her into darkness as her world shrinks. The use of powdered makeup and fragrance to catch the light is an especially effective technique that complements Courtney Bednarowski’s ostentatious hair design.

Musically, the piece also underlines the imbalance, the work of her brother, father, and contemporary noblewoman composer Marianna Martines are played loudly, while music standing in for Nanneri’s compositions (by Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen) is played on bells, a music box or a tea set, the smallness and domesticity of the instruments nevertheless does not diminish its beauty.

Following success at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, The Other Mozart makes a triumphant arrival to London. Working with limited archival sources (Nanneri states that the letters she sent to her brother have not been saved), Milo has crafted a moving portrait of the overshadowed sister of one of music’s great names. Hilarious, moving and heartbreaking by turns, Milo’s piece shines a light on a frustrated St Cecilia and asks us to question which other unique, female voices have been silenced throughout history.

Tag Archives: Rob Tomlinson

F*CKING FUTURE

★★★★

Sadler’s Wells East

FCKING FUTURE*

Sadler’s Wells East

★★★★

“a triumphant return to Sadler’s Wells”