Rambert and (LA)HORDE’s We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon

Rambert & (LA)HORDE’s Ballet national de Marseille just unveiled their huge site-specific project breaking out all over the Southbank Centre…

(LA)HORDE’s ‘The Beast/Tomorrow is Cancelled’, part of ‘We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon’ at the Southbank Centre. © Hugo Glendinning.

Rambert and (LA)HORDE Ballet national de Marseille
We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon
★★★✰✰
London, Southbank Centre
3 September 2025
rambert.org.uk
www.ballet-de-marseille.com
www.southbankcentre.co.uk

As site-specific spectacles go, full marks to the Southbank for doing something so crazy big that even three hours is not really enough to take in the UK premiere of We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon. Originally put on in Cannes three years ago by (LA)HORDE for their Ballet national de Marseille, this version artistically folds in Rambert, its dancers and school, together with community performers for an all-up cast of 80.

There are over 30 works, videos and installations scattered across many floors in the Royal Festival Hall (RFH), outside on the terrace, and more in the Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH) and smaller Purcell Room, together with their huge entrance foyer. Many works/installations are continuous, but some happen at designated times. Trying to plot an itinerary proved too tedious an affair, and I just decided I’d roam while being aware of two or three times and locations I’d really like to hit. There is a large dollop of serendipity here, and I think that rather fits in with the sweep of the night.

Two other bits of housekeeping. “We should have never walked on the moon” is a quote borrowed from Gene Kelly, who was reported to have said it to Buzz Aldrin. Make of it what you will. More puzzling to me was the blurb: “…this ambitious project explores the role of the body in a post-internet age of infinite information, communication and expression. It subtly considers the dominance of mainstream American culture and how movement becomes a force of homogenization.” It’s really good marketing speak but I’m not sure I saw a show that delivered and welded those sentiments into anything meaningful or cohesive, so much as a lot of modern, mostly urban, dance and a feeling of throbbing beat-driven excitement to come around almost every corner. As you might expect, the reality was that some corners delivered much excitement and some felt like a wrong turn.

Cars featured highly, and the lead image for the show highlighted a stretched limo — in reality placed outside on the terrace at the front of the Festival Hall and rather a letdown when I looked in a couple of times. Dancers crawled and draped themselves across the limo while others spray-painted largely unreadable words/slogans on the paving around, swiftly removed by a posse of little street-cleaning machines. The Beast/Tomorrow is Cancelled must have cost a small fortune to mount, but didn’t really deliver much above a few moments of eyeball titillation. Later, in a piece called Low Rider (in the QEH Foyer), there was a skeleton of an SUV that could be remotely controlled to do extreme tilts and bounces, at times assisting two dancers in making out atop the beast. At other times it became a bucking bronco, the dancers clinging on desperately. But again, there was the feeling of an expensive prop that didn’t deliver so much dance excitement, really.

If you wanted to see live raunchy sex, then the QEH Foyer was definitely the place for you. In Weather is Sweet (again by (LA)HORDE), six dancers took rump presentation and rubbing bodies to impressively raunchy levels, assisted by a clubbing soundtrack. Eleven minutes of power and pleasure, if also a strong reminder that going back a century or two, dancing girls were seen as fair game for the male gaze and sexual exploitation. There was more self-pleasuring in Oona Doherty’s Lazarus, over in the RFH Clore Ballroom. I’m not really sure why, in a work to a manipulated ethereal score that otherwise had its six all-white-clad dancers slowly moving and looking on as one occasionally collapsed. It felt like a perplexing eight-minute sketch for something with bigger points to make.

Also in the Clore Ballroom was Cecilia Bengolea & François Chaignaud’s Grime Ballet for three male and one female dancer, all in pointe shoes. To a hip-hop soundtrack, it was the footwear and a very skimpy costume or two that intrigued, rather than the wider movement. That said, it briefly conjured a crown erected on pointe shoes and more floating above. Now that was choreographically inventive. When Grime and Lazarus were not performed, there was a (LA)HORDE-created loop — To Da Bone — which had eight dancers bouncing to hip-hop in blocks and lines while DJ Krampf provided the aural fizz. Down below the Ballroom was a little-visited video installation that charmed me way more. Cloud Chasers, a video by (LA)HORDE, shows artists blowing smoke rings. At two minutes, it’s gorgeously slight and clever. And Deep Stream Narcisse (I think), wandering the foyers, was fun as a solo dancer concentrated only on an elaborate selfie stick covered in tens of mobile phones presenting a distorted picture of reality.

There was more serendipity in the QEH Foyer pop-up where Rambert dancers performed Caravaggio — a short five-minute section from Room With a View excerpt that has four dancers looping around in an inventive mix of circus and contemporary dance. This was reprising movement from the recent Rambert x (LA)HORDE show in May, and great to see it again. From the same show, but in the QEH itself, Rambert also reprised (LA)HORDE’s Hope(E)Storm, a drum-led and breathless piece that riffs on social dance. A magical 15 minutes well spent, it really made me happy and rightly got an awful lot of applause.

Lucinda Childs’ nine-minute Concerto was also on the QEH stage, danced by seven Ballet national de Marseille dancers to some Górecki. With the dancers identically clad in black, this is 30-year-old minimalism at quite some variance to everything else I saw. In one way, that was welcome if its clever austerity and constricted palette of movement conjured into nimble lines and patterns feels a bit too buttoned-up.

Running from 7 to 10 PM, there was a closing finale in the QEH Foyer in the form of a haka. A reminder of the sheer intimidating power of dancers en masse, but perhaps it went on too long, and I don’t think it’s necessary to hold out to the end if you’ve had your fill earlier. In my case I’d have been better seeing some of what I missed including Benoit Swan Pouffer’s new work - he’s the Rambert artistic director. That and much else not seen.

I’ll close with some notes to take forward if this approach to a night comes around again. The key to the show is an A4 map of what happens where and when, but it’s actually poorly designed and laid out. The text is way too small, the cross-referenced numbered icons even smaller, and even in good light, it was hard to read. It becomes near impossible in the subdued lighting that prevailed nearly everywhere. The programme PDF gives more useful information about each work but lacked any clarity about the inspiration or drivers behind any of the works being shown. Even a couple of sentences would be useful to folks. But putting on We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon has clearly been a huge undertaking, and I applaud the Southbank for thinking at such scale and hope more such nights are conjured by them — I really do.

We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon runs each night until 6 Sep. Booking