After discovering natural springs on his land in the Islington area of North London in the eighteenth century, Richard Sadler opened his gardens to the public and allowed them to sample the mineral water from the wells he’d built. As visitors flocked to the Sadler residency in Rosebery Avenue, he added live entertainment for their engagement, including music recitals, dance performances and wrestling. The Sadler’s Wells Theatre that followed gained a reputation for showing audiences a good time, but the endeavor was mismanaged. At the close of the 19th Century, Sadler’s theater had crumbled into dereliction.
Enter the remarkable Lilian Baylis. The impresario had already breathed new life into London’s famous Old Vic theater and was eager for the Sadler’s Wells Theatre to fulfill the possibilities she envisaged for the place. In 1925 Baylis raised enough money to buy the theater, and by the end of the 1930s, the in-house ballet company she had assembled counted the likes of superstar ballerinas Margot Fonteyn and Alicia Markova in its number. Their crowd-pulling power and box office-busting performances at Sadler’s Wells prompted Baylis to stop using the theater for any other forms of entertainment (the likes of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson had acted in Shakespeare plays there) and double down on dance productions. Lilian Baylis was proud of her achievements, and rightly so. In Elizabeth Schafer’s 2006 biography, she relates that when Miss Lilian Baylis was hurt in a car accident, an onlooker shouted, “It’s Miss Baylis. Miss Baylis of the Old Vic.” Despite her predicament, Baylis straightened up and corrected them, “AND Sadler’s Wells.” Thanks to Lilian Baylis’s foresight and acumen, Sadler’s Wells Theatre is one of the world’s best-known, most revered dance venues, and the organization is celebrating the opening of its new London site, Sadler’s Wells East.
Before the U.K. capital took its turn to host the Olympics in 2012, the British government had committed to using the sporting infrastructure built in the area of Stratford in East London—named Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park—to further the city’s reputation as an international cultural destination. Stratford and its surrounding London boroughs had been neglected; the Olympics offered an opportunity for regeneration and it’s here that Sadler’s Wells East has landed. The move would have pleased Lilian Baylis, whose motto was “dare, always dare.” While the original Islington theater retains its grandeur, it underwent major modernization in 1998 to move with the times (adding the 180-seater Lilian Baylis Studio in the process), and the new East London site sparkles with the same potential. The architects for the Sadler’s Wells East project build, O’Donnell + Tuomey, have already augmented London’s arts landscape. The team behind the successful relocation of the Photographer’s Gallery from Covent Garden to Soho in 2012, they’re also working on a new branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum, V&A East, set to be built in the same Olympic Park complex as the new Sadler’s Wells space. Other new neighbors include the BBC Music Studios and the London College of Fashion.
The second Sadler’s Wells site arrives on a wave of historical confidence earned by the Roseberry Avenue venue. Merce Cunningham danced there to a live score by John Cage in 1985. Mikhail Baryshnikov took the Sadler’s Wells stage in 1993 with his White Oak Dance Project. The Martha Graham Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater have performed in the space, and the original theater remains the go-to stage for international dance companies on tour. British dance pioneer Sir Matthew Bourne’s company is a regular booking, as are the Dance Theatre of Harlem and Carlos Acosta’s Acosta Danza troupe. The late lamented German experimental dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch chose Sadler’s Wells as the U.K. stopover for her Tanztheater Wuppertal troupe’s glorious performances. In November last year, the Senegal-based company L’Ecole des Sables staged Bausch’s epoch-making 1975 production The Rite of Spring there. (Based on Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet score, Bausch’s version calls for the theater’s stage to be covered in an ankle-deep layer of soil).
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Global reputation aside, the Sadler’s Wells Theatre also champions community-based talent, and the East London site will invest here, too. In July of this year, both venues will share hosting duties for the inaugural YFX Youth Festival, a new annual dance festival that sets out to celebrate dance and choreographic youth work from across the U.K. The series of events will include the London premiere of England’s National Youth Dance Company’s new as yet untitled work by Olivier Award-winning hip-hop dance company Boy Blue. Led by producer and musician Michael Asante and choreographer Kenrick Sandy, Boy Blue does crucial work, using dance to explore social tensions and cultural identity. Sandy was awarded an MBE for services to dance and the community in 2017 with Asante receiving the same honor for services to music five years later. The YFX Youth Festival will also showcase Sadler’s Wells’ Making Moves initiative, a new choreography and performance outreach project for forty-eight schools and youth groups from across England, and One Dance U.K.’s Young Creatives enterprise, a national program that helps young choreographers develop their ideas.
In the meantime, Sadler’s Wells East opens with choreographer Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu’s Our Mighty Groove, an immersive performance that blends club and dance music genres—house, vogue and waacking—with African dance. During Sadler’s Wells East’s planning stages, the architects committed to creating a building that could incorporate outlandish ideas. In March, the space will become a metaverse for the Ballet National de Marseille’s virtual video game experience, Age of Content, and in April, the auditorium will be converted into a skatepark for a new work from Danish dance-maker Mette Ingvartsen. As the U.K. arts scene suffers crisis after crisis under extraordinary funding cuts and the country lurches from one social media-fueled culture war to another, it’s comforting to know that Sadler’s Wells is daring to expand its commitment to new ideas in dance and performance.
