Margarete, R and D, Wilton’s Music Hall

Review

Jo Meredith’s Margarete investigates the tragic heroine of Goethe’s Faust, whom Faust grooms, seduces, impregnates and abandons. Meredith, a choreographer with a growing reputation, works with text created by long-time collaborator Sean Bruno. Using five dancers, she shows us a stylised folk dance set to barrel organ music and the sound of gulls. Margarete, a voiceover tells us, “pours tonic into thin glasses of gin” and “doesn’t want to die in a seaside town”. In another fragment, a minimalist dance unspools to a spoken meditation on the sea (“to hate it would be to hate yourself”). The result, while already displaying the intensely distilled character of Meredith’s work, is wholly enigmatic, but it’s enough to set the hook. I want, very much, to see the finished piece.

Luke Jennings, The Observer

Creative Team

• Choreographer: Jo Meredith
• Text: Sean Bruno
• Dancers: Grace Hann (Dance Captain), Katherine Kingston, Jessica Barlow, Alex Tinney, Luke Clarke, Tom Broderick, Sonya Cullingford, Jordi Calpe Serrats.

Photography: Mikah Smillie