Julia Cheng’s choreography for Cabaret is one of the most distinctive aspects of Rebecca Frecknall’s multi-award-winning production. She has also been involved in encouraging the exceptional finalists of the BBC’s Young Dancer 2022, which reached its inspiring conclusion last weekend with a worthy winner in the joyful 17-year-old Adhya Shastry. Cheng, like Shastry, is clearly a woman to watch.
Her quality and originality are obvious. But although Warrior Queens, created for her own House of Absolute company, is a labour of love developed over many years, which grew out of the Sadler’s Wells Breakin’ Convention festival in 2016, it feels less innovative than Cheng is. Inspired by female fighters as disparate as Mulan and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, it opens with the powerful image of spotlit figures, each in an individual cone of light (courtesy of lighting designer Joshie Harriette), raising their arms, hands flexed, like a row of statues.
