Review: Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom, Southbank Centre

Holly Blakey‘s productions have been attended by Vivienne Westwood; she’s designed the movement for the music videos of Florence and the Machine and Coldplay and worked with the likes of Gucci and Off-White. Her shows have kicked off the reopening of Queen Elizabeth Hall in the Southbank (Cowpuncher which we reviewed back in 2018). In short, she is cool, her audience more like a photoshoot for Moschino than the Chanel black and pearls of dance’s usual clientele. It’s all very edgy and intimidating.

She has a divine ability with the visual. A Wound with Teeth is an excerpt from Lo, coming in 2026. Matthew Josephs’ costumes look like the Drag Race girls doing a period challenge: we get codpieces, Tudor silhouettes and veils paired with exposed hips, spandex, and sequins. Tattered frills swing and whirl and keep our eyes darting about as the dancers’ prance and promenade. Viewing the piece as a taster, a morsel of a future greater undertaking, explains the lack of set. However, without reading the ephemera one might be confused by the glad-ragged humans rolling about in what looks like a rehearsal room to ritualistic recorded monastic chanting.

After a surprise interval, we get Phantom a piece originally commissioned by the London Contemporary Dance School for the EDGE Postgraduate Dance Company (now closed) and filmed by FACT Magazine. Again, the visuals are on point, Chopova Lowena clads the 10 dancers in tartans and catsuits of spray-painted looking neon. Maximalism and punk riot in front of our eyes as Gwilym Gold’s recorded guitars dissociate away in the background. Again, a lack of set means the piece’s focus is on the dancers alone, for better or worse.

I would argue the focus is too much. Despite the years between the pieces, they have a very similar corporeal language. The chicken dance blends with ravey skanking and balletic lifts and pas de chats. This soup of references is Blakey’s USP. Working collaboratively with the same indefatigable dancers will obviously create familiar movements, many of which lodge deep in the mind.

Chester Hayes opens the show dressed like an Elizabethan baby, complete with bonnet and hose stays, and is then seen lunging and cavorting in the little grey cells. Naomi Weijand, Elisabeth Mulenga, and Liana Kleinman’s matted and flowing follicles blend with equally dishevelled costumes providing the hair-ography that Blakey so loves. All the dancers never stop, rolling, writhing, pounding on and off stage. There are conga lines, where each person reaches backwards and holds the head of the one behind, snaking around the space. Interaction with the oversized costumes is amusing as they hide under the voluminous skirts and flick their glittering fringe, a treat for the eyes if not necessarily the ears or mind.

The relentless and chaotic nature of both pieces feels like the swamping waves of a storm, and the many thematic layers seem equally entropic. Although eye-catching and stimulating the lack of set and clear narrative flummoxes at times. When reading the blurb afterward pieces do slot into place, but shouldn’t a show stand alone, clear in its exploration? I’ll leave that question open-ended.

Directed and produced by: Holly Blakey 

A Wound with Teeth & Phantom has completed its current run.