Return of the miraculous kung-fu monks
Dance Sutra Sadler’s Wells
Few dance productions have made such an impact as Sutra.
This striking collaboration between Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, sculptor Antony Gormley and 19 Buddhist monks from the Shaolin Temple in China, has toured the world, selling out to audiences in 28 countries. A decade later, it returns to Sadler’s Wells for its 200th performance, and still fizzes with the excitement and inventiveness that have made it a hit.
It is indeed an incredible spectacle of athleticism. Cherkaoui made a trip to the temple, the birthplace of Zen Buddhism 1,500 years ago, to study the unique philosophy behind the Shaolin tradition and to enrich his own movement vocabulary. In
Sutra, he explores the way that the monks, famous for their warrior skills, relate spiritually to animals and the environment and how they blend faith and physical strength.
These divine protectors are ambassadors of their craft, though the initial team of monks have slowly been replaced with new ones over the years, the temple happy to provide a continual supply of its finest protégés.
We start with a man and a boy sat on a silvery steel slab at the side of the stage. Ali Thabet (in the role of narrator, originally danced by Cherkaoui) arranges toy-size building blocks, demonstrating to his novice what is taking place on centre stage in real size. The young boy monk, no taller than a grasshopper, then highkicks and backflips his way across the stage, whirling his way into the action and putting his theory into practice. Gormley designed 21 plain, five-sided, human-sized wooden boxes for the show, but rather than serve as stage props, they become the very essence of the production, forming different patterns and creating a transformable space for the performers to travel through. They don’t only serve as boxes, but as bricks to build Stonehenge-like structures, beds, baths and even coffins.
Cherkaoui’s choreography roves startlingly freely. The boxes are lined up like piano keys, housing the monks like toy soldiers, and moved around like chess pieces on a board. When they tip them over, they fall to the floor echoing the sound of a bass drum, but when they lever them down they look like the unfurling petals of a lotus flower in all its fullness and splendour.
All this is effortlessly balanced with martial arts frenzy as the monks wield swords and spears and pivot and somersault with impressive skill.
The production has been nipped and tucked over the years and now runs to a tight one-hour, non-stop performance. There’s an enhanced element of playfulness which particularly delights when the boy monk expresses relief after a particularly hair-raising sequence of leaps atop the towering, toppling boxes. Thabet, meanwhile, the sole Western figure on stage, clownwalks Buster Keaton-style down imaginary stairs.
He remains the lonely onlooker rooted in his own steel box, but is finally accepted into the group, bringing about a harmonising between East and West. It’s an enthralling, mind-expanding piece of theatre.