When I am in Tate Modern I often stand in front of a painting by Mondrian and experiment with my mind’s eye in moving the blocks of primary colour around across the black lines of the frame. So far from offering a random outcome, the emotional resonances of abstraction are precise despite the absence of narrative and naturalistic forms.
I had the same thought during Sadiq Ali’s remarkable show Tell Me which stopped briefly at The Place on its current tour. Neither purely contemporary dance nor aerial acrobatics, it conjures a wide range of very specific emotional reactions from the physical interactions of three performers within three scaffold-framed red cubes. They take us on an hour-long journey of great emotional specificity and variety despite the fact that there is only a sliver of story and no detailed characterisation. Yet despite the absence of these familiar dramatic markers, every episode registers with rare eloquence, communicating a powerful message to the audience with complete lucidity.
After a highly charged opening sequence of stylised love-making, Phoebe Knight is handed a small red cube, which symbolises her HIV diagnosis and what follows is a series of parallel scenes with a gay man, Michael, played by Sadiq, whose diagnosis took place at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis back in 1985. They are joined at intervals by Jonah Russell in a variety of roles, as they manoeuvre and spin within the cubes and hang, pivot and swing from the vertical Chinese poles that constitute their uprights.
All this is achieved with a lighting design of great complexity and subtlety and a soundtrack of period standards and effective underscore that combine to form one tableau after another of huge emotional power and dazzling visual beauty, partly geometric but also softened by the shifting combinations of human forms. It only lasts an hour, but you feel that you have travelled with the performers through a huge emotional arc.
Some of the most impressive moments come when the cubes are set spinning within each other in different directions or hoists come into play to introduce different levels into the action. Sometimes the performers seem trapped in the apparatus as they struggle to come to terms with their health and life crises, while at other points the structures are sheltering and nurturing symbols that become truly affecting as the performers snuggle up to one another within them.
Likewise the emotional range of the performance styles is as broad as the commitment is edgy and boundary-extending. There is partial nudity from all performers, and no inhibitions whatsover in physical risk and mutual synergy, as sexual intimacy, substance excess and gentle joshing intimacy are all fully but still expressively explored. The technique from all performers is awesome, and the confidence supreme; but what lingers most in the memory is the overall effect, as one of the best meditations on all the moods of HIV crisis that I have seen, and a timely reminder that it is still very much with us.
The Place
Sadiq Ali Company
Director: Sadiq Ali
Performers: Sadiq Ali, Phoebe Knight, Jonah Russell
Touring until 10 February 2026
60 minutes
Photo Credit: Alberto Santos Bellido