Sadler’s Wells, London
October 29, 2025
I attend a ritual created by Akram Khan and Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan. The stage is a circle of women. They loosen their hair, their breath becomes sound. The ceremony promises connection and healing, yet something within it feels distant, as if the sacred has forgotten how to return.
Movement is precise, the ensemble formidable. Hair lashes through the air, the sound rises from the floor, drums and chanting mixing with the dry friction of sand. The rhythm is powerful, yet the energy never escapes its design. Within this geometry, faith becomes choreography. The matriarch, the ancestor and the two sisters are both emblems and captives of belief.
Photo Camilla Greenwell
Azusa Seyama Proville carries the gravity of a matriarch. Ching-Ying Chien moves with a spectral grace, a body that seems to remember rituals the mind has lost. Nikita Goile burns with a strange, witch-like energy, while Samantha Hines, the vessel, shifts between human and doll, her control almost otherworldly. Together they weave a duet of possession, at once beautiful and unsettling. Their hair binds them, recalling the ancient idea of being joined by a single thread. Hair as promise, hair as tether. Freedom and restraint breathing in the same motion.
Yet beyond this architecture of control, another pulse moves. The bharatanatyam-trained dancers hold a different kind of truth. Their bodies, carved by time, stand in clear and solemn shapes, reminscent of goddesses carved into temple stone. They do not summon divinity, they become it. Each hand gesture, each change of gaze, carries an ancient rhythm that the new choreography cannot contain. For a brief moment, the ritual awakens, and the stage breathes.
Photo Camilla Greenwell
Thikra, the final touring work by the company before its closure in 2027, remembers the gestures of faith but forgets its surrender. Ritual becomes form, memory becomes ornament. It speaks of connection but remains untouched by it. In its beauty lies precision; in its precision, loss.
At the beginning and at the end, the woman in white lies silent on the floor. The circle closes where it began, perfect yet unresolved. What remains is a polished stillness, a call made into silence, with no spirit answering.