Ballet Black, The Waiting Game, The Coronet Theatre

The Coronet Theatre is forging a productive relationship with Ballet Black, the small ensemble for dancers of Black and Asian descent, which has carved a firm place for itself in the UK's dance panorama.

Last Autumn, The Coronet screened Ballet Black's lockdown film, Eightfold. Now it's screening another film: the made-for-the-screen version of The Waiting Game, which is the latest work by the company's hugely talented South African dancer and choreographer Mthuthuzeli November.

The work premiered at the ROH Linbury Theatre in the autumn as part of a new double bill.

The film last 35 minutes approximately, after which there will be a Q & A session with members of the artistic team: Cassa Pancho (founder/artistic director), Mthuthuzeli November (choreographer) and Nauris Buksevics (film director).

Below is Culture Whisper's review of the on-stage performance of The Waiting Game.

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Entitled The Waiting Game, this piece is bursting with ideas and references, not least to Samuel Beckett’s Theatre of the Absurd.

A door slides slowly towards a crumpled man (November himself) and Sayaka Ichikawa peeks over the top as if daring the man to come through.

The man, though, seems paralysed by his own angst, and as a monotonous voice intones his unchanging day-to-day life: ‘get up. Brush my teeth. Open a door… I go to work’ and so on and so on. He twists and turns, crumples and clutches his head, jumps and crouches.

The door opens and a group of bizarrely clad figures file in (costume designer Peter Mood). In their flouncy blouses, some with big sleeves, some with ruffs, they tease and challenge the man. Are they his own obsessive thoughts made flesh?

Eventually he is persuaded through the door only to emerge in sequins along with everybody else dancing exuberantly to Etta James’s Something’s Got a Hold on Me.

It’s a jolly coup de théâtre, a worthy finale to an evening of many moods and splendid dancing.