Dimitris Papaioannou has stunned audiences at Sadler’s Wells with a new run of his dance theatre piece ‘INK’. A towering display of visual imagination, visceral choreography, and the power to shock, the show offers a tormented insight into the mind of a great creator on the world’s stage, alongside a scale of spectacle difficult to find elsewhere.
Long awaiting Papaioannou’s return to Sadler’s Wells, British audiences had been deprived of the original run of INK by the Covid-19 pandemic, making this most recent showing a UK debut. First commissioned by Torinodanza Festival in 2020, the narrative of INK follows the intertwining and complex relationship between two men; one clothed and the other nude; both caught in a desperate bid to create, and to change their circumstances. In what he has described as possibly his last time taking to the stage, Papaioannou himself plays the role of the clothed man, joined by young German dancer Šuka Horn as his partner for the piece, and together the two generations of artists weave a beautiful, disturbing, and tragic performance worthy of nothing less than the standing ovation it received.
Returning to familiar territory, Papaioannou has described the work as engaging with traditional Greek myths in order to form its own mythology. Embracing water as its theme, INK finds the Sadler’s Wells stage endowed with a shallow pool, into which a hose almost ceaselessly sprays its contents, and behind which are draped enormous plastic sheets that catch and reflect the light as it scatters off the water. Often undulating, moved invisibly from behind, or openly hosed by Papaioannou himself, these curtains form a constant movement against which the piece is set, creating a hypnotic and dreamlike environment onstage.
If Thales once theorised that all the world was made from water, with its elements only reconfigured to give rise to other substances, Papaioannou has positioned himself as the philosopher’s dramaturgical counterpart. From the water, his partner emerges, from the water the drama takes form, and as an author dips his pen in the ink, Papaioannou uses water to write his narrative onstage. Like his previous work, nakedness and primality are a focus of the performance, in which Horn appears to take life as the counterpart to Papaioannou’s own role (both in the show and outside it) as creator. Against the sophistication of the dressed man, Horn is magnetic as a fierce and unpredictable animal; shaping his body into breath-taking contortions and uncanny caricatures, and working his way throughout the show from his character’s birth as a monstrous creation to the master of his own fate.
Taking cues from Promethean myth, futurist aesthetics, and theatre of cruelty, INK is a celebration of the darkness in Papaioannou’s creative oeuvre, the establishment of new a talent in Horn, and a delightful and surreal shock to the senses. A work that demands a response, and lingers long after the curtains have been drawn, its accomplishments are impossible to deny, and neither are the depths of its resonance.
Dimitri Papaioannou, INK Sadler’s Wells
