Ballet Black - 'Pioneers'

Ballet Black is the pioneering ballet company that was founded in 2001 by Cassa Pancho MBE, in response to a perceived lack of professional Black and Asian ballet dancers in the UK. Now based at The Barbican in London, their touring company last visited Norwich Theatre Royal in 2018, and returned to Norwich this week with a two-part programme, co-commissioned by The Barbican, and reinforcing the company's remit to celebrate diversity in ballet.

'Then and Now' was conceived and written before any of us could fully appreciate the legacy that a pandemic could deliver, and certainly before conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza would come to dominate the news, and yet there remains something very powerful and almost timeless about this piece. Eight dancers arise from a pre-arranged circle of chairs, moving elegantly and expressively to the sound of a lone violin, and to the powerful poems of Adrienne Rich, and with choreography by William Tuckett. The lighting is stark, and as Rich's poems, read by the voices of Hafsah Bashir, Natasha Gordon and Michael Shaeffer reflect on modern-day dilemmas and dichotomies, and memories of the past, both good and bad, are exorcised as if we are watching a support group meeting for the whole of humanity.

After the interval, Ballet Black return with 'NINA : By Whatever Means', a colourfully orchestrated tribute to Nina Simone that takes archive recordings of speech and song from the celebrated jazz singer and civil rights activist, and fuses them with choreography by Mthuthuzeli November. The piece initially opens with Simone's retirement announcement at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, before stepping back almost forty years to her childhood as Eunice Wayman in North Carolina, and her dream of becoming the world's first black female classical pianist. The piano becomes an enduring symbolic motif of that dream, remaining on stage throughout the whole piece, as the young Nina Simone instead becomes a club singer in Philadelphia and New York; falls in love, only to fall victim to an abusive husband; and becomes one of the best known voices of the American civil rights movement. There is colour and there is passion along the entire journey, David Plater's lighting design and Jessica Cabassa's costumes leading us seamlessly through the decades, but it is Isabela Coracy's impassioned dance embodiment of Nina Simone that is truly breathtaking, graphically supported by Ebony Thomas as her husband Andrew Stroud.