Review: CHICOS MAMBO: TUTU, Sadler's Wells East

Philippe Lafeuille’s TUTU arrives at the Peacock with the air of a sugar rush and the spine of a manifesto. Beneath the sequins, beneath the tulle, beneath the knowing smirk, there is something else at work: lineage.

At fourteen, Lafeuille saw the company of Maurice Béjart and, like so many before him, experienced the sort of epiphany that rearranges a life. Béjart filled vast auditoriums with muscular theatricality, bare chests gleaming, dance made epic and democratic at once. Lafeuille clearly took notes. TUTU shares that ambition for scale and accessibility, even within the comparatively intimate frame of the Peacock. It wants everyone in. And it mostly succeeds.

Béjart’s influence runs deeper than spectacle. The all-male troupe, frequently bare-chested and clad in the skimpiest of costumes, harks back to Béjart decades before Matthew Bourne made male swans a British talking point. There is a frank physicality here, bodies displayed not merely for parody but as instruments of virtuosity. The joke lands because the technique is real. The ribcage may be out, the tutu may be fluorescent, but the turnout is legitimate.

Yet Lafeuille is no mere disciple. His teenage ambition to become a puppeteer finds full, mischievous expression in this show. At several points, dancers are manipulated by bunraku-style performers, swathed in black bodysuits, who propel them into shapes that seem to defy human physiology. Limbs flail, torsos hinge at impossible angles, and at one delirious moment a body appears to take flight as though gravity has been temporarily mislaid. It is not simply a visual gag. It is a sly commentary on control in dance, on who moves whom, and on the illusion of autonomy in a choreographed world.

A crucial element of the lashings of comedy seen here is clowning of a very high calibre. Lafeuille did not study at the knee of the recently departed pedagogue Philippe Gaulier. He simply discovered he could do it. As a young hopeful waiting in line to audition for a choreographer, he would amuse himself and his fellow trialists with absurd movements, silly poses and elastic expressions. Their laughter was the only review he needed. That instinct now permeates TUTU. The performers pratfall to the ground with an enviable exactness, preen with peacock pomposity, and collapse into bathos with split-second timing. It is clowning that understands precision.

Accessibility is the governing motif. Lafeuille understands that not everyone comes armed with a mental catalogue of European modernism. So he layers the piece. For the cognoscenti, there are affectionate nods to the emotional minimalism of Pina Bausch’s Rites of Spring, Martha Graham’s flowing locks and dresses, Loïe Fuller’s ethereal fabric experiments, even a wink towards William Forsythe’s architectural deconstructions. These references are deft rather than laboured, Easter eggs for those who haunt Sadler’s Wells, the Barbican, and The Place.

But, as in the film Airplane!, the many references don’t stop everyone from having a good time and some nods are more obvious than others. You’d have to have had a very bad day not to laugh out loud as Lafeuille gleefully skewers and reassembles Swan Lake, and then there’s a gloriously daft riff on Strictly Come Dancing, the mother ship of televised twirl. The high and low do not clash. They coexist. A fouetté can sit comfortably alongside a glitterball.

The company of six are formidable: dancers first, comedians second, athletes throughout. Their timing is razor sharp, their stamina impressive. When not racing each other en pointe in barely more than a tutu and a grimace, they gracefully glide around in huge nappies or in woolly leggings. An 80-minute, interval-free sprint could easily exhaust lesser performers. Here it feels like a party that never quite tips into chaos, though it dances flirtatiously close.

Originally slated for the Peacock Theatre, the production shifted at the last minute due to maintenance works (I blame Flipper the ghost dolphin). It proves a fortunate relocation. In a larger auditorium with steeply raked seating, every raised eyebrow and hyperextended arabesque is visible. The scale suits Lafeuille’s Béjart-bred ambitions. This is dance that relishes a crowd.

Now in its eleventh year of global travel and approaching its 800th performance, TUTU shows no sign of creative fatigue. If anything, the longevity has burnished its mischief. The six performers execute the interval-free 80 minutes with stamina to spare, sliding between parody and prowess without visible strain.

If there is a critique, it is that the relentlessness occasionally blunts the edge of the more subtle references. Not every viewer will clock Bausch or Forsythe before the next gag barrels in. But perhaps that is the point. For all its clever pointers to seminal choreographers, TUTU is not a lecture. It is an invitation.

In an era when dance can feel siloed between the rarefied and the populist, Lafeuille attempts both. Like Béjart before him, he believes dance belongs in big rooms with big audiences. The tutus may be outrageous, the torsos gleaming, the puppeteers lurking in black, but the message is clear: this art form is elastic enough to hold everything. Reverence and ridicule. Erudition and entertainment.

And, crucially, us.

Chicos Mambo’s TUTU continues at Sadler’s Wells East until 15 February.