This June, Phoenix Dance Theatre returns following their sell-out 2025 production Inside Giovanni’s Room, presenting a new mixed bill, Interplay, running 24–27 June at Sadler’s Wells East. As the longest-established contemporary dance company outside London, Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Theatre reflects the diversity of multicultural Britain, creating work that engages with cultural narratives often overlooked or underrepresented.
The programme brings together work by internationally acclaimed choreographers Travis Knight and James Pett (Pett Clausen-Knight), Ed Myhill, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, and Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Artistic Director, Marcus Jarrell Willis. The evening celebrates creative collaboration, exploring themes of duality and the fusion of distinct artistic voices. Featuring both duet and ensemble works, each piece offers an interplay of contrasting perspectives while foregrounding artistic exchange.
Originally premiering in New York in 2013, Marcus Jarrell Willis’s Next of Kin has been newly reimagined for Phoenix Dance Theatre. The duet explores the subtle humour and tension between two kindred spirits navigating life together. Ed Myhill’s Why Are People Clapping?! (restaged by Camille Giraudeau) is set to Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and uses rhythm as its driving force. With wit and precision, the choreography highlights the music of life – rhythm can be found in a tennis match, footsteps in an empty street and in the beat of our own hearts.
In Small Talk by Travis Knight and James Pett, two figures inhabit a shared yet distant space. Through quiet gestures and unresolved tension, the work reflects on relationships that fade not through catastrophe, but through the slow exhaustion of time. The work showcases a portrait of two people held in a fragile standoff, suspended between the familiarity of what once was and the truths they now refuse to acknowledge.
The evening concludes with a powerful new collaboration by Yusha-Marie Sorzano and Marcus Jarrell Willis. Inspired by ritual, meditation and the roots of hip-hop and house culture, Suite Release reclaims dance as instinct, resistance and communal connection and joy, inviting audiences not only to witness movement, but to remember it.
Marcus Jarrell Willis, Artistic Director of Phoenix Dance Theatre, said: “I’ve always found it intriguing to observe dual artistic expression – the ways two creative minds come together and collaboratively work towards one goal in creation, while maintaining their individual artistic expressions. The programme consists of different forms of artistic duality, through choreographic voices, as well as the structure of the dance works themselves. I think it will be interesting for an audience to see a full programme that focuses on this particular theme (duality), while highlighting a range of different works.”
Interplay runs from 24th to 27th June at Sadler’s Wells East for tickets and further information, please contact the Ticket Office on 020 7863 8000 or visit the website
Image © Drew Forsyth
