In the centre of a minimal stage, set designer Jacob Hughes has placed a single room. It’s a cube, separated from the outside world; a refuge, an escape, or perhaps a trap. It effectively sucks your attention, just as it sucks in David, the protagonist in James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room, and what happens in here explodes his life.
Literary adaptations in dance are fraught with pitfalls, predominantly how to express the intricacy and specificity of thousands of words through movement only. “There are no mothers-in-law in ballet,” George Balanchine famously said. Here it is aunts: there’s no way you’d know the woman in red is David’s aunt (unless you read the synopsis, which is recommended) but perhaps it doesn’t matter. What dance can do is express Aunt Ellen’s disapproval though her superior gait and dismissive flick of the wrists.
There is a lot that is said through bodies alone in this new retelling by Phoenix Dance Theatre and the company’s artistic director Marcus Jarrell Willis. The way in the opening scene, David (danced in this performance by Aaron Chaplin) moves as if his body’s not entirely under his control, almost tripping himself up, a shorthand for the physical urges that will drive him off course when he meets handsome bartender Giovanni (Tony Polo). There’s the dance between the two men, skirting each other, with nerves and reticence and then the dawning certainty of a connection; with hunger and tenderness. There’s an urgency pushing at the movement throughout, the pulse of a city’s nightlife, the club scenes cleverly threaded with slivers of styles that look at times like the 1920s, at others the 2020s – Willis brings a currency and vernacular groove to his choreography.
There’s some nice craft: the opening of Act II – snapshots of David and Giovanni’s relationship between blackouts, the tension stretched, especially when life outside Giovanni’s room encroaches – is very effective. But it feels as if there are depths and details of Baldwin’s text unilluminated, sometimes plot, sometimes the different textures of fear and anxiety, hatred and self-hatred. And there’s a claustrophobia in Marc Strobel’s layered score that becomes grating, the volume ramped up to create “atmosphere”, as if they don’t trust that the dance could speak for itself.
• At Dundee Rep, 12 March; Northern Stage, Newcastle, 19-20 March; Birmingham REP, 28 May; Liverpool Playhouse, 5 June; and Sadler’s Wells East, London, 11-14 June
• This article was amended on 11 March 2025 to note that the reviewer saw a performance in which David was danced by Aaron Chaplin. The images used show David when the role is played in the same production but by Teige Bisnought.
