Review: Many Lifetimes, Sadler’s Wells Lilian Baylis Studio

Making work about grief is tricky. It’s not a particularly unique experience, yet grief is totalising – all-consuming enough to merit continued excavation. Yewande 103, a Black, disabled-led, parent-led dance organisation founded by Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley, present a ‘community of transforming solos’ at Sadler’s Wells’ Lilian Baylis Studio, set between a shimmering, mirror-pooled Mylar floor and a draped linen canopy overhead. The installation itself becomes Many Lifetime’s most compelling element, transforming the black box into an alchemical chamber where earth, water and air converge to explore death as process rather than endpoint.

Under low lights, three performers in undyed natural fabrics fold, stack, and arrange cloth onstage as a fourth enters, narrating a poetic, ritualistic opening: ‘Gathered here we will work… cycle through moments that changed us.’ An invitation to breathe together begins the piece, or perhaps the ritual. In this work, dance functions as testimony. Performers move with the quality of live speech: halting, circling back to revive gestures, building intensity, retreating. The solos accumulate and layer: hands clasp chests and faces, Graham-type contractions suspend and exhale, heads are covered as if refusing to see.

The set design, by Rūta Irbīte and Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley, is mesmerising. The reflective floor creates rippling, aquatic effects that make motifs of swimming and floating feel visceral rather than metaphorical. As performers move, their mirrored doubles move beneath them, making the underworld visible. The reflections ripple across the back wall, amplifying the sense of submersion. Above, the linen canopy – fabric that was literally buried and then unearthed – functions as both shroud and sky. Throughout the piece, melting ice drips through the canopy’s fibres, each drop marking time, transformation and dissolution. This is the installation’s standout element: the water slowly seeping through a burial cloth. As an audience member, I longed for the performance to surrender more fully to this element’s dramaturgy. 

Text is woven through the piece. ‘What did you get from my living?’ one performer asks. Later, under a spotlight, another performer admits, ‘I need to whisper to myself provocations… Happy? What is happy? What is happiness?’ Near the end, birdsong morphs into a breakbeat as performers break their inner circle to move into the audience. ‘Can we touch each other’s hearts for a moment?’ one asks me, approaching my chair. Though sincere, these moments of audience participation feel sudden and confrontational, shifting the audience’s role from observer of ritual into participant in intimacy we haven’t been warmed up for. What could ease this transition is earlier acknowledgement of the audience’s presence, building toward touch through proximity, eye contact or smaller gestures of connection.

The piece ends with performers dancing in a rotating diagonal until the lights fade. ‘Hope is all I have, hope is all we have,’ someone whispers. Yewande 103 has clearly created a beautiful collective through this work, with a shared practice of processing loss. The performers are generous with their emotions, and it is touching to observe how they support and hold space together. There is genuine community here, but it is not clear whether we are part of or party to it. The installation invites us into an alchemical space of transformation, but the performance itself keeps us at arm’s length. In trying to make grief universal through ritual, ‘Many Lifetimes’ is powerful yet insular: a beautiful world we can see but cannot fully enter.

Concept, Creative Direction, Collages, Text  & Choreography: Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley
Performing collaborators: Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley, Greta Mendez MBE, Rudzani Moleya, Bee Solomon & Alice Tatge
Sound Design & Composition: Bianca Wilson, Femi Oriogun-Williams & Ray Aggs
Additional Track: João Caetano & Dave Archer
Set Co-Design: Rūta Irbīte & Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley
Set Fabrication: & Installation Rūta Irbīte
Costume Design: Abiola Onabule 
Original Dance Movement Collaborators: Pierre Babbage, Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley, Rickae Hewitt-Martin, Greta Mendez MBE, Rudzani Moleya, Bee Solomon & Alice Tatge
Original Lighting Design: Michael Morgan
Producer: Yewande 103

Many Lifetimes has completed its run at Sadler’s Wells’ Lilian Baylis Studio