Dance: Sarah Crompton’s five best shows of 2024
1. Assembly Hall
Sadler’s Wells, London/Festival theatre, Edinburgh; March/August
It’s rare for a dance piece to make you laugh; even rarer to find one set in a medieval re-enactment society meeting in a rundown community hall. But the glory of Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s new 2024 work, made for her company, Kidd Pivot, was its uniquely oddball worldview, which took the dynamics of a squabbling group and transformed them into a searing Arthurian legend full of love, loss and heroism.
2. Or Forevermore
Royal Opera House, London; October
Shown in a night of new work at the Royal Ballet, Pam Tanowitz’s playful 30-minute ballet had a wit and virtuosity that revealed a total understanding of dance history and of the skills of its dancers, led by a dazzling Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell.
3. Metamorphoses/Echo and Narcissus
Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath; February/June
Kim Brandstrup continues to mine Greek myth in compellingly understated yet haunting ways. Metamorphoses was a duet that turned blind Cupid (Matthew Ball) into a man in need of forgiveness from Alina Cojocaru’s floating Psyche. Echo and Narcissus played with ideas of self and other, in images of yielding action and reaction.
4. Autobiography (v95 and v96)
Sadler’s Wells; March
Choreographer Wayne McGregor ended the year with the sumptuous MaddAddam for the Royal Ballet. Autobiography, for Company Wayne McGregor, also explores story and who tells it, in a piece full of mysterious feeling and complex patterning.
5. an Accident/a Life
Theatre Royal, Norwich; May
The surprise of the year, co-choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and conjuring the accident that left dancer Marc Brew paraplegic at the age of 20. The story is told with voiceover, props and film, but above all by Brew himself, expressive and powerful despite all that has happened to him.
