BalletBoyz at 25 – Sadler’s Wells

What does a 25-year retrospective owe us? Nostalgia, certainly. A greatest-hits reel, perhaps. What BalletBoyz offer instead at Sadler’s Wells is something more rigorous: a map of possibility.

Curated from works commissioned since 2001 by Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, BalletBoyz at 25 resists the flattening instinct of retrospectives. The evening moves with intent across forms, aesthetics, and dramaturgies, not as a sampler but as an argument. Movement is not one language. It is many, and they do not always agree.

The opening triptych, Critical Mass, Motor Cortex, and Ripple, operates almost like a study in physics. Bodies fold, suspend, and redistribute weight as if governed by invisible laws. In Motor Cortex, choreographed by Seirian Griffiths with lighting by Andrew Ellis, space is shaped with rare precision. The design serves the choreography rather than framing it, giving the work an architecture instead of a backdrop. It is a quiet lesson in restraint, especially when set against later pieces where the balance slips.

Across most of the programme, the company of male-presenting dancers offers a striking proposition: strength without domination. Touch is constant. Support is assumed. The bodies on stage are not competing for space but organising it together. This is not softness. It is control redirected.

That makes the rupture of Bradley 4:18, drawn from Kae Tempest, land with force. Here, energy turns inward and feral, with no structure to hold it. The stage contracts. Contact breaks down. What had been collective becomes isolating, almost tribal in its logic, closer to West Side Story than to the shared intelligence seen elsewhere.

Narrative appears and recedes throughout. Young Men leans into it, tracing a soldier’s fractured psyche with clarity and weight, while other works resist legibility altogether. Not every piece convinces. Serpent lingers on form without quite articulating its stakes, and Us remains elusive to the point of distance. But even these moments feel like part of the contract. The range is the point.

Each work is introduced through voiceover or filmed insight, and crucially, the company is explicit about its aim to demystify process. What emerges is not simplification but exposure: collaboration as negotiation between choreographer and dancer, between direction and interpretation. As a model of artistic leadership, it is quietly, yet powerfully enlightening.

This is not a company looking back. It is a company showing how far the field can stretch when curiosity is allowed to lead.

BalletBoyz runs at Sadler’s Wells until 16th May. https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/still-pointless-balletboyz-at-25/

Reviewer: Klervi Gavet

Reviewed: 13th May 2026

North West End UK Rating: