It’s rare for a Varsity writer to hand out five stars, just as it is rare for a Cambridge student to score 85% on an essay – an achievement so mythical it may as well not exist. We write with wit and irony, shaping even the most mediocre performances into engaging reviews. But tonight, there is no room for irony. Sola demands something else: stillness, honesty, and the kind of awe that lingers long after the final movement.

A dance piece rooted in the exploration of absence, Sola constructs a presence out of emptiness. Each night, four dancers perform self-choreographed solos, offering deeply personal interpretations of isolation. No two performances are ever alike – opening night featured violinist Jem Preller, drummer Frankie Steel, and pianist Michael Gurevich will play on Thursday. Sola creates an atmosphere both dynamic and deeply intimate.

Izzy Megilley’s piece ‘Vertigo’ begins in frantic motion, her body barely contained, as though trying to outrun something unseen. Then, suddenly, she slows – her frame folding inwards, fear and revulsion creeping into her expression. The haunting melange of drums and violin swings between chaos and eerie silence. At one point, she moves alone in darkness, a single spotlight catching her in an almost supernatural glow. It feels as if we are watching a death, followed by a resurrection. The air itself seemed to shift. This was not just a dance - it was an exorcism of exhaustion, a physical manifestation of burnout. And in Cambridge, where ‘burnout’ is practically a paper, this piece felt uncomfortably close to home.

“Sola demands something else: stillness, honesty, and the kind of awe that lingers long after the final movement”

Then, Lucy Sims steps onto the stage, alone. No music, only light on her skin, the sound of her breath. It’s a bold choice – how long can silence hold weight without tipping into melodrama? – and yet, she holds it. Her solo, ‘Lucia,’ explores loss: the absence of a figure so central to her existence that she is left searching for somewhere to put all they had meant to her. The programme describes ‘Lucia’ as a piece about a person who was the whole of Italy, someone whose absence left behind a void. I sat motionless, my pen forgotten – not because there was nothing to record, but because I was too absorbed to break the spell. A failure for a reviewer, perhaps, but a triumph for the performer. When Sims finally retreats through the door, disappearing into darkness, I was stunned. It felt like a requiem for an entire continent, an entire cosmos. She was more than Italy. She was the Sun.

Isobel Dyson’s ‘The Line’ oscillates between two worlds – one lit in red, the other white. Her body moves between slow, deliberate gestures and bursts of frenzied motion. The piece explores how isolation transforms the body, how it twists the mind into patterns of movement both constrained and desperate. Dyson’s dance feels like a fight against something unseen but inescapable.

Last week, I attended a poetry talk where the speaker mournfully confessed that she had no language as a poet, only an aching need for something beyond words, something vast enough to hold what language always seems to leave behind. As I watched Dyson move, I wondered if I, too, lacked the words to articulate my thoughts. But for a brief moment, her dance gave me hope that movement could bridge that gap – that there is a language beyond words, one that is quiet, expressive, and free. As she exited through the door, I wondered: has she truly escaped, or simply entered another kind of confinement? Perhaps there is no exit from the spirals of the mind. Or perhaps, in the act of dancing, she found a language that made the struggle bearable.

“Sola is not just a performance; it is a reckoning with solitude”

Lastly, there was Anise Hartley, who began seated on the floor, barely distinguishable from the shadows. A sound – wind, perhaps? – whispers through space. Slowly, deliberately, she rises, as if the entire room is rising with her. The music was ethereal, drawing me in completely. Her piece, ‘People or Stars’, leans into repetition, exploring how familiarity with oneself can become a force of isolation. Halfway through, the music stops - an apparent technical mishap. But Hartley doesn’t falter. In that moment, she becomes the music, her body carrying the rhythm where sound has abandoned it. I am mesmerised, caught between witnessing and feeling, as if being pulled into the quiet gravity of her presence. As an English student, I have been taught to always find something to say, to unearth meaning from silence. But here, words failed me – not because there was nothing to say, but because there was too much, and language felt inadequate to hold the weight of it all.

These dancers are more than students juggling deadlines and exhaustion – they are artists who have created something that doesn’t just ask to be seen but demands to be felt. Sola is not just a performance; it is a reckoning with solitude, a meditation on absence, on the quiet spaces we try to fill. Each movement carries the weight of isolation, turning emptiness into something tangible, something understood. Some productions fade. Others stay with you – not just in memory, but in the body, in the way they change the spaces we inhabit. Sola is one of them.

‘Sola’ is showing at the Corpus Playroom from Wednesday 12 until Saturday 15 March, at 9:30pm.

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