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Review at a glance
Anyone apt to bang on about cloistered kids who can’t look up from their iPhones should seek out Sutra, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s smash-hit dance spectacle, which celebrated its 10th anniversary at Sadler’s Wells last night.
Within a few minutes of the curtain rising, the show’s smallest star, seven-ish-year-old Xing Kaishuo , has somersaulted, headfirst, off a towering eight-foot crate; by the end of the hour, he’s grappled with swords, spears and knives, not to mention pole-wielding monks from China's Shaolin Temple. And this isn’t stage-friendly play acting: there’s real power behind every swing. When Sutra premiered in 2008, Cherkaoui’s kung fu-inspired choreography popped and fizzed with inventiveness; a decade on, 200 performances and thousands of touring miles later, and its sheer ingenuity still dazzles.
Much of that is down to sculptor Sir Antony Gormley’s deceptively simple set; 21 wooden crates which, under the monks’ guiding hands, variously become coffin-like hideaways, stacked bunk beds or dominoes to be toppled. In one striking moment, 18 monks scuttle across the stage, carrying their boxes like shells; in another, they slowly lower them to the stage, the shape unfurling like the petals of some huge exotic flower.
Amid it all wanders Ali Thabet (in the role originally danced by Cherkaoui), trying to discover a way into the monks’ culture by aping their extraordinary scissored kicks, deep pliés and gravity-defying leaps. Ignored and then rebuffed, his perseverance is rewarded when — to Szymon Brzóska’s plaintive string-led score — he is admitted into their final hypnotic routine. Stunning.
Until March 28. Sadler’s Wells