Siren Dance by Lilian Steiner
Random Taranto by María del Mar Suárez (‘La Chachi’) and Lola Dolores
Barbican Pit, London
October 8, 2025
Change Tempo, Dance Umbrella’s signature mixed bill, brings distinctive, international artists to London’s stages. This year, three fierce women command the Barbican Pit and challenge our expectations of classical dance forms while doing so.
Even before Siren Dance truly begins, Lilian Steiner evokes a mermaid. Sea-green tulle blooms around her shoulders and her hair is slicked back as if wet. Stepping up onto pointe shoes, and down again, she calmly traverses the stage. Her face remains mysteriously hidden for long enough to imagine all the ways she might reveal herself.
Photo Gregory Lorenzutti
When she does, Steiner is instantly magnetic. The toes of her pointe shoes rapidly strike the stage, rooting the lower body so the upper body can flourish and ripple, hands articulated like curlicues. Steiner demands our attention with the fullness of her movement. A sequence repeats and each time, its seams are pulled apart. This shimmering, elegant seductress morphs into chaos. It is as if an external force, or perhaps a force within, is glitching her façade. The ethereal grace of a dancer on pointe is too a façade behind which is discomfort and pain, the ideal juxtaposition for Steiner to explore deception. Posed on the floor, she flutters her eyelashes with exaggerated allure, a falsity that succeeds in unsettling us.
A creepy change of costume feels like something we shouldn’t see, like catching a clown painting on their mask. Steiner’s new disguise consists of brown fabric trailing from her hands and feet. Washed ashore, or entrenched in a swamp, she struggles to stand. Her slow, peculiar advances across the floor are slightly tragic, and yet still seductive. The movement never departs from its aesthetics into the gritty animalism that this new disguise seemed to signal. In them not being met, prior expectations of this creature are later made clear. Perhaps the real spectacle is precisely what happened while we waited.
A different kind of spectacle follows the interval, one conjured from body percussion, vocals, and comedic timing.
Photo Eneko
As the audience enter, María del Mar Suárez (‘La Chachi’) and Lola Dolores are sat on basic orange chairs as if at a bus stop; Suárez nibbles pumpkin seeds and spits out the seeds while Dolores rolls a cigarette. A rhythm begins to creep its way into their shoulders and fingertips, fragments of a hum building in their throats. From start to finish of Random Taranto, they cannot resist it. Even after joyously succumbing to song later, it still lives on under their breathe as the show comes to a close.
The duet strikes a delicious contrast between the casual and the urgent. In tracksuits, the pair ooze nonchalance while flamenco rises and falls with exhilarating tension. As with Steiner and her modern take on pointe shoes, Suárez’s flamenco is infused with idiosyncrasies and contemporary theatrics that render the pair comical and yet effortlessly cool. Dispersed in impeccable technique, pedestrian gestures simultaneously tickle and impress.
They make for a ferocious pair when performing but are entertaining even when doing nothing at all. False starts litter the piece, broken up by extended silences as Suárez and Dolores stare the audience down. Tension builds in their bodies and voices and then… nothing. The audience lap it up when these moments finally develop into mighty bursts of song and dance in which Suárez fires her heels into the ground and Dolores claps, her magnificent vocals filling the Barbican Pit with ease.
Audience interaction is met with flexibility. When the pair quietly return to their chairs, seeds and cigarettes, someone from the crowd gleefully attempts to sing flamenco. They are soon met with a side eye from Dolores, as if her and Suárez were not the protagonists of the outrageous show that came just before. How swiftly they turned the tables, and how delightful it was to witness.