Dance

Born to Manifest is the latest dance work by the acclaimed choreographer and performer Joseph Toonga and his company Just Us Dance Theatre. A hip-hop piece for two dancers (Toonga and Dani Harris-Walters), it is a powerful, invigorating, enraging and almost unbearably moving evocation of the experience of young black men in Britain.

As a performing arts critic, I see a lot of stage works. Consequently, I hope, I have developed a strong sense of the difference between cheap sentiment and the real deal.

The unexpected death has been announced of Lindsay Kemp, I was going to say the dancer, but he was far, far more than this. He had a profound effect on the art and music scene of the 1970s and beyond and he was at the centre of an LGBT+ cultural revolution in London. As he once said, “We wanted to change the world, and we did for at least ten minutes.”

Racist Tory politician Enoch Powell is well and truly nailed for his “politics of the gutter” in this triumphant celebration of Caribbean migration.

It comes as we hear words from Powell’s vile “rivers of blood” speech made in 1968 which whipped up hatred up over immigration, predicting that black people will gain the “whiphand”. Ten years before Powell was the minister who had initiated such migration to solve Britain’s post-Second World War labour shortage.