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, bobbydazz.