Traplord is dancer, choreographer and director Ivan Michael Blackstock’s vivid, visceral and multilayered meditation on black British manhood and the stereotypes swirling round that topic. Blackstock has been developing the work, in various iterations, for close to a decade now. A version that Sadler’s Wells helped to bring to a space at 180 Studios in 2022 won an Olivier award for best new dance production. Now it is back for a short run at the new Sadler’s venue in east London.
The show’s episodic blend of seething, explosive hip-hop movement, throbbing beats, blistering but also heartfelt spoken word and astute digital imagery is as confident, bold and sometimes ambiguous as ever. Not all of it lands, but it is an ambitious, arresting achievement put across by a nine-strong cast in a stage environment that suggests both a stripped-back grungy landscape and some kind of hallowed, yet gated, heaven.
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Watching Traplord is akin to being inside a dangerously dark yet dazzling video game. The designs, by Shankho Chaudhuri and Chloe Lamford, conjure a sense of artifice. The effect is abetted by Simisola Majekodunmi’s restless, occasionally colour-drenched and/or blindingly bright lighting. Ian William Galloway, meanwhile, contributes some marvellously apt video footage of soulless, flaming streets and rocky terrain that a lone, helmeted figure speeds through via motorcycle or on foot.
The performances are raw, full-on yet controlled. Among the most notable is that of the poet Magero, delivering a couple of monologues that veer beautifully from botched crime to unexpected romantic stability and, at the climax, raging frustration to collective healing. The key to Kanah Flex’s extraordinarily bendy-limbed solo is in his surname. Blackstock himself makes the most of a prominent role as a comic but spooked-out vagrant in a bunny-eared hoodie. Addressing suicide, homicide and violence, Traplord is loud, audacious, edgy, surprisingly sensitive and worth seeing.
★★★★☆
90min
Sadler’s Wells East, London, to May 31, sadlerswells.com
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