Review: ALiCE, Sadler’s Wells

Anyone expecting a traditional retelling of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s story might be in for a shock. Jasmin Vardimon’s treatment is complex and anything but family friendly, dealing with time, memory, relationships, identity and death in equal measures. Returning to Sadler’s Wells after a previous run in 2022, ALiCE is as visually and physically dynamic as ever, with highly stylised contemporary dance, though no less narratively confounding.

The evening begins with an inventive pre-staging moment in which the dancers’ bodies form a giant live clock face projected overhead. This tableau introduces the central theme of time and its manipulation, one that threads through the production with varying levels of clarity. From there, though, the audience is plunged into a far more chaotic experience, with a deliberately disorienting opening as performers rush onto the stage with an assortment of objects.

Guy Bar-Amotz and Jasmin Vardimon’s set design is one of the production’s strongest visual triumphs. Large sheets are suspended and manipulated like the pages of a book, flipping and fluttering across the stage with dancer interaction. This offers a powerful visual metaphor for storytelling, one that manages to ground the sometimes-erratic progression of the show. The episodic structure, with chapters projected onto the wall, favours spectacle over arc, and the emotional stakes of Alice’s journey are, at best, implied rather than explored. In this imagining, the character of Alice acts more as a passive observer than an agent of change, lacking the drive needed to centre the whirlwind of events around her. 

The Cheshire Cat is transformed into a body-popping trickster. While initially entertaining, the extended body-popping sequence, set to a pounding, near-deafening electronic dubstep track, overstays its welcome. In fact, the music is so loud that much of the subsequent dialogue becomes completely inaudible. 

But there are moments of delightful strangeness, including a full-cast number in which every dancer appears dressed as Alice, gyrating to a frenetic country-clubland track. It’s an arresting, if surreal, image, both playful and disorienting, reflecting the show’s broader aesthetic of identity confusion and performative multiplicity. Donny Beau Ferris and Sean Moss are standouts for their virtuosic physicality, leaping and tumbling over each other with exhilarating ease. Risa Maki also impresses with moments of astonishing strength, poise, and near-geometric precision in her movements.

Puzzlingly, the cast repeatedly performs the viral ‘griddy’ dance move throughout the production, a decision that elicits laughs but seems wholly disconnected from the work’s tone or source material. While it might have been at the height of popular culture in 2022, around the same time that Fortnite was at peak popularity, today it felt as though it merely underscored the show’s tendency to chase novelty at the expense of cohesion.

The final sequence did return to thematic resonance. A series of movements reflect the passage of time, aging, and the ephemeral nature of memory, before the set settles into a closing image of an open storybook, bookending the piece with some sense of completion and clarity.

ALiCE remains a feast for the eyes and a showcase for remarkable dance talent. It is aesthetically bold, often exhilarating, and unafraid to confound expectations. Its departure from narrative discipline, plus some jarring tonal choices and occasional sensory overload, did at times make it more overwhelmingly confusing than anything else. Enjoyable? Absolutely. Cohesive? Not quite. The revival confirms Vardimon’s continued flair for theatrical experimentation, but also suggests that style, without clear storytelling purpose, can only take a production so far.

Co-Produced by: Gulbenkian Arts Centre, iCCi, Sadler’s Wells, DanceEast and Kent County Council
Concept, Direction and Choreography by: Jasmin Vardimon MBE
Set Design by: Guy Bar-Amotz and Jasmin Vardimon
Lighting & Projection Design by: Andrew Crofts
Sound Design by: Jasmin Vardimon and Joel Cahen
Costume Design by: Elisabeth Sur and Dorota Wieckowska

ALiCE plays at Sadler’s Wells until Saturday 24 May.