Ballet Black at 25 review – dazzling double bill brings forth resistance and hope

It’s 25 years since the indomitable Ballet Black was founded, and to mark the occasion they present us with a crackingly good double bill. The company generally commissions works from external choreographers, but here it rightly blows its own trumpet with a revival of a breakthrough piece by one of their own – Ingoma (2019) by Mthuthuzeli November, who has since gone on to work on an international scale.

It doesn’t take long to see why this piece punched through. Its subject is the 2012 South African Marikana strike, where police killed 34 miners, and what initially looks like scene-setting – dark figures in overalls and headlamps, a single man centre-stage (Ebony Thomas), joined by his wife (Isabela Coracy) for a pleading duet – soon gives way to episodes of resounding force, the miners’ rhythmic gumboot dance hardening into the relentless heave and lunge of hard labour. Focus then switches to their womenfolk, whose wrenched gestures and blunt pointework speak of their own rage and struggles. Driven by relentless drumbeats and rising strings, the two groups merge into an outburst of revolt, its aftershock registered in isolated, tortuous solos by Helga Paris-Morales and Taraja Hudson. Throughout, November keeps the physical and emotional dynamics high, but always human.

Centre stage … Ebony Thomas in Ingoma.

Preceding this dense social drama comes … all towards hope, an abstract and entirely disarming new dance by American choreographer Hope Boykin that speaks – often literally, in voiceover – of idealism, warmth, openness and community. If words signpost the territory, sometimes didactically, the choreography has an eloquence all its own, deftly twining individuality and togetherness into lovely skeins of motion: lines that ripple out and reform, sudden sprints that pull others into their tailwind, easy walks and heart-lifting sways that the dancers unaffectedly share with each other.

While moods shift from serious to playful, or cool to warm, one figure (Coracy) weaves like a subtly gleaming thread through the scenes, a point of identification who sometimes steps outside the flow, whether to attend to a wordless self-portrait that another dancer is showing her, or to cast smiling eyes across the audience until we understand that we, too, are together in this work.

Resistance and hope in one evening of dance – in current times, that’s a gift.