London’s annual international Dance Umbrella festival is at once a venerable institution and a crucible for the new. Founded by Val Bourne in 1978 and nurtured by Betsy Gregory, this year’s festival is dedicated to the memory of Emma Gladstone, who ran it with pioneering enthusiasm and taste from 2013 to 2021.
She died earlier this year, and on opening night the current artistic director, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, who took the reins in 2021, made an emotional speech and asked everyone to dance for her. Like his illustrious predecessors, he is shaping the programme afresh, introducing new global trends, encouraging the new, the bold, the transformative.
This year’s festival features five UK premieres and one European one across a variety of spaces, plus an extensive digital programme available for whatever you can pay. The vibrant tone was set by Hatched Ensemble, by the South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza, a formally rigorous and deeply beautiful piece of dance that uses her background as a ballet-trained dancer to raise questions of identity and belonging.
Expanded from a solo first seen at Dance Umbrella in 2011, it opens with its 10 dancers sitting quietly in a pool of light as Saint-Saëns’ The Dying Swan plays on a loop. They are surrounded by delicate wire sculptures – swans, cockerels, windmills. Bare-chested, wearing long net tutus held together with pegs, they pull on pink silk pointe shoes and begin to move, arms making graceful arcs, feet a percussive patter, raising the objects like icons of their lives.
As an opera singer and a traditional African multi-instrumentalist shift the mood, introducing different sections of music, so the dancers constantly “hatch” and change, putting on red hats which they hang on the washing line that spans the stage and which are revealed as net dresses and shiny plastic coats.
It’s a piece of contrasts, and as the dancers shift the movement stirs and evolves as well. They come off pointe and beat their feet on the stage, the movement more grounded, more African. They pick out different rhythms. At one moment they stand in a group facing the audience, with their stylised makeup – pink shiny eyes, white lips – not hiding the personalities that are beginning to emerge, or the challenge they offer. Finally, they peg the ballet shoes on the line before revealing themselves in great slaps of the feet and whirls of liberated, unified dancing. It’s both direct and subtle, cleverly wrought and deeply felt, absolutely stunning to see.
On the festival’s digital programme, Lea Anderson’s film The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele gets a world premiere. With her all-male Featherstonehaughs and female Cholmondeleys (who celebrate their 40th anniversary this year), Anderson was once the darling of UK contemporary dance, but over the past decades has rather faded from view.
This work, inspired by the expressionist artist Schiele, with music performed live by Steve Blake and Will Saunders, was recorded in 2010, and reveals Anderson’s strengths and her weaknesses. It looks sensational, with costumes by Sandy Powell and makeup by David Hoyle (recreated by Emilie Yong) that turn the dancers into living paintings, sculpted groups emerging from the shadows. The movement is stylised and sophisticated, but also repetitive. It feels overextended by its own artfulness, yet is an important record of a significant force in British dance.
Star ratings (out of five)
Mamela Nyamza: Hatched Ensemble ★★★★
The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele ★★★
Mamela Nyamza: Hatched Ensemble is at the Barbican, London, until 12 October
The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele is available online until 31 October
Dance Umbrella runs at various venues, and online, until 31 October
