This sprawlingly ambitious dance show certainly delivers atmosphere. Forty years ago, the Chatham dockyard shut up shop, ending over 400 years of building ships for trade, exploration and empire. When industry slinks out, heritage marches in – now it’s the Historic Dockyard Chatham, a museum of maritime endeavour. Under cover but open to the elements, it makes an epic space for an epic story.
Icon Theatre is based in Medway and director Nancy Hirst builds a story of the dockyards and the town they dominated, of British seafaring and the empire it enabled. That’s a big ask in 85 minutes. On a wide traverse stage, with audience and video on all sides, dancers from ZooNation (hip hop) and Amina Khayyam Dance Company (kathak) embody these mighty themes, with a huge community choir and loads of youngsters.
Figures step from the past, though storytelling isn’t always clear. Elizabethan trader John Hawkins takes the stage with a scowl and windmilling assertion. Two centuries later, John Newton journeys from drunken bullyboy pressganged into service to frockcoated abolitionist and composer of the hymn Amazing Grace. Olaudah Equiano arrives in a shuttle of dizzying footwork; his autobiography of enslavement literally rocks Georgian Britain on its heels.
The most cohesive section centres on the predations of the East India Company. Kathak dancers zip across the floor with a beguiling rattle of ankle bells. Clive of India wears his redcoat like a boast, and his snaky, bobbydazzler moves launch a dance of colonial despoilation, all stomping feet and grabbing hands. As the singer Sohini Alam keens, dancers sorrowfully unwind their skeins of bells, the bodies that whirled in joy now crumpling in hunger.
I won’t lie, I did sometimes long for this to be a nice BBC4 documentary fronted by David Olusoga. A projection after the Battle of Trafalgar states “the British gained dominion over the seas” – a line which can’t pass without irony or footnotes. Nuance inevitably falls through the cracks in a show with a celebratory impulse but that wants to acknowledge the shadowy side of British history.
The dockyard and the ships it built opened a window on the world, as dance exemplifies. Hip hop and kathak are just two of the forms that ripple through the British scene, but which might never have made their way here without our fraught history with Africa, India and the West Indies. Choreographed by Khayyam, Kloé Dean and Dannielle ‘Rhimes’ Lecointe, dancers from these two distinct styles forge a winningly tight ensemble.
In voiceover, we hear other voices from the past – warmly describing working life in the dockyard, and lamenting its closure. One speaker admits to disliking history at school – it was just “facts about exploitation.” There’s no escaping that – but this show also tries to harness the frisson of discovery and renewal.
Historic Dockyard Chatham, to September 28; thedockyard.co.uk
