Getting to the soul of it: The Brown Suite by BlacBrik

Richmond Theatre, London
September 30, 2026

The Brown Suite is an extraordinary piece of dance theatre: inventive, creative, hugely engaging and performed by a company of quite exceptional dancers.

Created, directed and choreographed by BlacBrik founders, Nahum McLean and Darius Drooh, it uses the music of James Brown, Sam Cooke and Etta James to draw us into the world of 1970s New York nightlife, where friendships, attractions and shifting relationships play out across the course of a single evening.

The Brown Suite grew from McLean and Drooh’s earlier collaboration, Death of the Bachelors, presented as part of Ballet Nights. Would the ideas in that shorter piece work as a full-length dance theatre? Undoubtedly, yes!

McLean and Drooh dance in the work alongside Monique Jonas, Leila Wright, Lukas Hunt, Marie Astrid Mence, Hugo Bragg and Joshua Martina. All are highly skilled, technically proficient dancers, but what makes The Brown Suite particularly successful is that everyone imbues their dancing with character, humour, emotional depth and storytelling.

We encounter a group of people whose lives are already connected and follow them into the Brown Suite, a New York soul club. There, through dance, relationships form and reform, attractions develop, characters collide and emotional allegiances shift. It works brilliantly.

The programme notes explain that McLean and Drooh began with the music, and allowed the dance and narrative to emerge from it. That meant some of the James Brown’s best-known songs are excluded as they did not fit the story that was developing. This turns out to be one of the production’s strengths, keeping the focus on the dance, rather than allowing the music to be predominant.

The story is communicated entirely through the songs, choreography, body language and emotional interaction between the dancers. There is no spoken word. But who needs it? At no point is it difficult to understand the relationships being created on stage, or how they change. And the terrific cast fully inhabit their characters, pulling the audience into the world they are creating.

Maybelle Laye’s excellent costumes are period without ever appearing to restrict the dancers, who look completely comfortable moving in them. They always enhance the movement, never interfering with it.

The environment is created almost entirely through Joshie Hariette’s lighting rather than physical set. Hariette is known for his innovative and distinctive approach, treating lighting as another performer, effectively choreographing the light. His design creates the atmosphere of the club so successfully that it effectively becomes the set. You simply do not notice the absence of conventional scenery. It is extremely clever and often remarkably beautiful, if a little dark on occasion. Dancers do need to be seen, even when located in a slightly murky, smoky, neon-lit New York soul club. There were moments when the low lighting made following them harder than it needed to be.

But let’s be clear. The Brown Suite is a fabulously engaging and experience that draws you in totally. The audience was with the dancers almost immediately, and the company held them there throughout. There is an interval, which dramatically is unfortunate as it inevitably interrupts the flow of a story that feels as if it should unfold across one continuous evening. Impressive, however, is how quickly the company re-establishes the atmosphere at the start of the second half.

The ability to come back after an interval and regain an audience’s emotional involvement within those crucial first few minutes does not happen by accident. That it does so, is testament both to McLean and Drooh’s construction of the work, the performers delivering it and, I suspect, the work of rehearsal director Emma Harris, who has clearly done a remarkable job.

This is one to sit back and enjoy. The Brown Suite is packed with wonderful dancing, wit, character, tremendous music and choreography that understands how movement can tell a story without requiring a single spoken sentence. It’s marvellously entertaining from start to finish, and a production that leaves me very much looking forward to whatever BlacBrik does next.

The Brown Suite continues on tour to November 20, plus a London date at the Hackney Empire in May 2027.