Sadler’s Wells East, the brand-new purpose-built theatre for dance on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, will officially throw open its doors with performances of the opening show Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu's Our Mighty Groove, starting Thursday 6 February 2025.
Billed as ‘a gamechanger for dance’ by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, Sadler’s Wells East is the first public building to open as part of London’s newest cultural and educational district, East Bank, where it will sit alongside BBC Music Studios, V&A East, UAL’s London College of Fashion and UCL East.
The building is a nationwide resource for dance: a space for seeing, creating, rehearsing and participating in the artform. Designed by renowned architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, Sadler's Wells East is home to a fully flexible 550-seat auditorium, six state-of-the-art dance studios, a public performance space for free performances, a restaurant and a bar. The public spaces include two large-scale tapestries created by the acclaimed artist Eva Rothschild RA and the foyer lighting is designed by theatre designer Aideen Malone. The building will be open to the public throughout the day.
The new facilities will affect change on the UK’s dance ecology, providing a much-needed London base for mid-scale companies from the UK and around the world, and allowing Sadler’s Wells to produce work from scratch inhouse. In 2025, three new productions will be created in Stratford: the opening show, Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu’s Our Mighty Groove, Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet, which will embark on a nationwide tour in spring 2025, and a 2025 Christmas show for the new venue.
Sadler’s Wells East is home to two educational facilities: Academy Breakin’ Convention a hip hop theatre school for talented 16–19-year-olds, offering the UK’s first free Level 3 Diploma in Performance and Production Arts specific to hip hop, will welcome its first intake of students in the autumn to coincide with the academic calendar. The Rose Choreographic School is an experimental research project, which enables 13 dance artists to develop their own choreographic practice over a two-year course.
The opening season at Sadler’s Wells East features 20 productions and will showcase work from local east-London based artists, the best dance companies from across the United Kingdom, as well as platforming leading international choreographic voices. The new venue will present all forms of dance, from hip hop to ballet, contemporary to kathak.
Highlights from the opening season include Phoenix Dance Theatre’s adaptation of a seminal James Baldwin work in Inside Giovanni’s Room, Mette Ingvartsen’s Skatepark which trades a conventional stage set-up for half pipes and ramps as she works with a company made up of skateboarders and dancers, and a collaboration with Stratford East on a new production of Romeo & Juliet featuring actors and dancers from the local community.
Elsewhere, Trajal Harrell presents his latest work set to Keith Jarrett’s ’The Köln Concert’ and Joni Mitchell’s ’Blue’, Aakash Odedra shares an exchange between Indian classical dance Sufi kathak and Islamic poetry in Songs of the Bulbul and Ivan Michael Blackstock’s Olivier Award-winning hip hop production TRAPLORD questions the stereotyping of Black men in contemporary western society.
The opening season will culminate in a two-week youth festival in the summer, which will bring together the National Youth Dance Companies of England, Scotland and Wales, and share choreographic creations made by young people up and down the country.
Over 20,000 tickets, 50% of all tickets across the season are available for £25 or less, with £10 Barclays Dance Pass tickets for 16-30-year-olds for every single performance.
