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The Place’s Choreodrome; next steps brought two emerging dance makers, Orla Hardie and Samara Langham, to the main theatre stage with new works developed through Choreodrome, the venue’s annual residency and commissioning programme. Both artists began their choreographic paths at Resolution, and the double bill showed an interest in atmosphere, image and altered states of the body. It also revealed a common difficulty: how to make a strong image grow into a choreographic world.
Jemima Colin and Pete Butler in LoonHeads by Orla Hardie. Photo: Jorden Brooks.
Hardie’s LoonHeads places its distorted figures inside a small domestic set: two armchairs, a floor lamp, a yellow half-wall and red curtains. The room reads as safe, almost cosy. The stranger material seems to gather at its edges, especially in the lit space outside the set, but it never quite crosses the threshold or contaminates the domestic world.
The balloon-headed figures are the work’s strongest invention. In oversized coats and with a slow, floating walk, they suggest non-human creatures trying out gravity. They are funny, faintly unsettling and just odd enough to hold attention. But their oddity does not alter the rules of the room or change the relation between the performers. They appear, interact, and vanish, leaving the domestic frame largely untouched.
The closest the work comes to disturbing the interior is when the male performer sits in the armchair and a pair of hands appears behind him, a small horror-film image that briefly suggests the room may be growing strange.
The programme promises a playful exploration of the spaces between thought, feeling and imagination, accompanied by a sound score rich with riddles and clues. On stage, the riddle has too few clues. The work has atmosphere, pursuit, low drifting sound, and a few memorable images. What it lacks is pressure: a reason for one image to lead to the next.
Non-narrative work does not need a story. It does need rhythm, transformation, relationship, or tension. LoonHeads has the mystery, but not yet the mechanism. Even the ending arrives more as a blackout than a conclusion. There may be an intriguing work inside it, but here it does not quite solve its own riddle.
Jesse Baggett-Lahav and Lydia Walker in Nacre by Samara Langham. Photo: Susu Laroche.
Langham’s Nacre comes with a dense and suggestive metaphor. The title refers to the iridescent substance an oyster forms around an invading parasite, eventually creating a pearl hidden inside its own maker. The programme also speaks of polar forces, cycles of effort, edges, and a dark mass moving quietly. It offers a rich image of injury, protection, enclosure, and transformation.
The stage gives a thinner account of that idea. Four dancers move through blue light with repeated waves, ripples, tremors, and folding actions. The vocabulary keeps returning to the same soft contractions and releases, without much shift in rhythm, weight, or spatial pressure. At times, they look like underwater plants shifting in a tank.
One image stands out. A female dancer moves aside and begins to shake. Another dancer falls, crawls towards her, then holds her from behind until the trembling settles. It is the clearest moment in the work because it gives distress a relationship. Someone sees the body under strain and responds.
The gesture reads as care, or at least containment. Yet nothing much changes because of it. The image settles, then passes. Healing is suggested by the programme, but it does not become visible as a process on stage.
Elsewhere, the movement returns to waves, shaking, and folding without making clear what those actions carry. A later solo by the male dancer is nearly swallowed by flashing light, which makes the body harder to read.
A body wave is not automatically depth. A tremor is not automatically trauma. A blue stage is not automatically water, memory, or grief. Abstraction still needs rhythm, pressure, relation, and consequence.
Both pieces offer images that briefly shimmer. LoonHeads has a world but does not make that world mutate. Nacre has a metaphor but does not make that metaphor bodily legible. The evening leaves the sense of bodies without anchors: strange, suggestive, sometimes beautiful, and still waiting for the force that might hold them in place.
Bodies without anchors: Choreodrome; next steps
The Place, London
28 April 2026
Zoë Hewitt
The Place’s Choreodrome; next steps brought two emerging dance makers, Orla Hardie and Samara Langham, to the main theatre stage with new works developed through Choreodrome, the venue’s annual residency and commissioning programme. Both artists began their choreographic paths at Resolution, and the double bill showed an interest in atmosphere, image and altered states of the body. It also revealed a common difficulty: how to make a strong image grow into a choreographic world.
Hardie’s LoonHeads places its distorted figures inside a small domestic set: two armchairs, a floor lamp, a yellow half-wall and red curtains. The room reads as safe, almost cosy. The stranger material seems to gather at its edges, especially in the lit space outside the set, but it never quite crosses the threshold or contaminates the domestic world.
The balloon-headed figures are the work’s strongest invention. In oversized coats and with a slow, floating walk, they suggest non-human creatures trying out gravity. They are funny, faintly unsettling and just odd enough to hold attention. But their oddity does not alter the rules of the room or change the relation between the performers. They appear, interact, and vanish, leaving the domestic frame largely untouched.
The closest the work comes to disturbing the interior is when the male performer sits in the armchair and a pair of hands appears behind him, a small horror-film image that briefly suggests the room may be growing strange.
The programme promises a playful exploration of the spaces between thought, feeling and imagination, accompanied by a sound score rich with riddles and clues. On stage, the riddle has too few clues. The work has atmosphere, pursuit, low drifting sound, and a few memorable images. What it lacks is pressure: a reason for one image to lead to the next.
Non-narrative work does not need a story. It does need rhythm, transformation, relationship, or tension. LoonHeads has the mystery, but not yet the mechanism. Even the ending arrives more as a blackout than a conclusion. There may be an intriguing work inside it, but here it does not quite solve its own riddle.
Langham’s Nacre comes with a dense and suggestive metaphor. The title refers to the iridescent substance an oyster forms around an invading parasite, eventually creating a pearl hidden inside its own maker. The programme also speaks of polar forces, cycles of effort, edges, and a dark mass moving quietly. It offers a rich image of injury, protection, enclosure, and transformation.
The stage gives a thinner account of that idea. Four dancers move through blue light with repeated waves, ripples, tremors, and folding actions. The vocabulary keeps returning to the same soft contractions and releases, without much shift in rhythm, weight, or spatial pressure. At times, they look like underwater plants shifting in a tank.
One image stands out. A female dancer moves aside and begins to shake. Another dancer falls, crawls towards her, then holds her from behind until the trembling settles. It is the clearest moment in the work because it gives distress a relationship. Someone sees the body under strain and responds.
The gesture reads as care, or at least containment. Yet nothing much changes because of it. The image settles, then passes. Healing is suggested by the programme, but it does not become visible as a process on stage.
Elsewhere, the movement returns to waves, shaking, and folding without making clear what those actions carry. A later solo by the male dancer is nearly swallowed by flashing light, which makes the body harder to read.
A body wave is not automatically depth. A tremor is not automatically trauma. A blue stage is not automatically water, memory, or grief. Abstraction still needs rhythm, pressure, relation, and consequence.
Both pieces offer images that briefly shimmer. LoonHeads has a world but does not make that world mutate. Nacre has a metaphor but does not make that metaphor bodily legible. The evening leaves the sense of bodies without anchors: strange, suggestive, sometimes beautiful, and still waiting for the force that might hold them in place.
Zoe Hewitt © 2026.
By Zoe Hewitt • added recently on London Grip, dance, performance, theatre • Tags: dance, performance, theatre, Zoe Hewitt