Review: Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends (Sadler's Wells Theatre)

Review by Sam Woodward

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

New York City Ballet Principal Dancer, Olivier Award nominee, and UK National Dance Award winner Tiler Peck returns to Sadler’s Wells Theatre to present a glorious evening of dance in Turn It Out With Tiler Peck & Friends. Every bit as joyful as it is technically astonishing, it brings together ballet, tap, live music and contemporary movement in a programme that is deeply personal, beautifully shaped and utterly captivating from start to finish.

After its sold-out world premiere in New York, Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends came to Sadler’s Wells in 2023 for its well-received European premiere, and this latest visit makes clear its appeal is not a one-off. Peck’s programme of four contrasting works is fresh, generous and full of artistic purpose, offering far more than a showcase of exceptional technique. Instead, it emerges as an evening of collaboration, curiosity and joy.

For all the richness of the evening’s wider influences, ballet remains at the core of Turn It Out, and Peck’s dancing is a constant reminder of why. Her movement has astonishing precision and lightness, yet it never feels merely decorative. There is wit, warmth and real personality in the way she dances, along with the kind of assurance that makes even the most complex passages look entirely natural. What is so compelling about her performance is that it never settles for technical brilliance alone. Peck brings ease, intelligence and emotional openness to everything she does, making ballet feel not remote or formal, but vividly alive.

Peck is superb throughout, but the evening also gains enormously from the quality of the dancers around her. Lex Ishimoto makes a particular impression in The Barre Project, meeting its demands with thrilling sharpness and control, while India Bradley is a quietly moving presence in Thousandth Orange, helping to give Peck’s deeply personal work its tenderness as well as its beauty. Together, they show ballet here as a living language full of surprise and musicality. 

One of the evening’s greatest strengths is the way each piece creates its own world, particularly through its use of music and staging. The first keeps the focus firmly on Peck and her fellow dancers, allowing movement to take precedence. The second opens out into a more recognisable concert dynamic, with the band onstage adding energy and presence. The third shifts again, narrowing the focus to a lone pianist and just two dancers, while the fourth finds perhaps the most unusual texture of all, using voice, music and movement together to create something rich, playful and uniquely astonishing. Rather than feeling fragmented, these transitions give the programme shape, variety and a real sense of discovery.

Design is central to the success of the evening, with lighting and costume sharpening the character of each work without ever distracting from the dancing itself. The lighting is especially effective throughout, subtly shaping the atmosphere and helping each piece find its own visual identity. Costume is just as strong across the programme, but Thousandth Orange deserves particular mention. As Peck’s own choreography, created during a period when injury left her unable to dance, it carries a particular emotional charge, and that intimacy is beautifully supported by Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme’s pastel costume design and Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting. Together, they shape a world that is warm, thoughtful and quietly striking, deepening the sense that this is not just a beautifully made work, but an emotionally resonant one.

The most distinctive of the four works is Time Spell, choreographed by Tiler Peck, Michelle Dorrance and Jillian Meyers. It is a thrilling collision of ballet, tap, voice and contemporary movement, alive with spontaneity and rhythmic invention. Aaron Marcellus Sanders and Brinae Ali are central to its impact, their vocals shaping the piece from within rather than sitting outside it, so that music and movement seem to generate one another in real time. The tap is especially exhilarating, giving the work an infectious drive and immediacy, while the whole piece carries the kind of restless, playful energy that sends a buzz through the auditorium. In a programme full of highlights, Time Spell feels like the point at which everything clicks into place.

What Peck has created here is something rarer than simple excellence: an evening that feels both masterfully crafted and genuinely uplifting. Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends is elegant, inventive and full of life, offering a reminder of just how thrilling dance can be when ballet, music and movement are allowed to speak so freely to one another. It is a five-star triumph, and one that audiences should rush to catch while they can.

Turn It Out with Tiler Peck and Friends plays at Sadler's Wells Theatre until 14th March. Tickets from https://allthatdazzles.londontheatredirect.com/dance/turn-it-out-with-tiler-peck-tickets

Photos by Christopher Duggan