‘I hate goodbyes,’ Solène Weinachter says near the end of AFTER ALL. Yet her first self-created solo is all about them – a meditation on death and grief that begins as comedy, only to turn achingly vulnerable.
The theatrical skills that Weinachter honed as a performer with Ben Duke, among other choreographers, serve her well here. She lands jokes with ease, starting with her reenactment of a funeral in France. Surreally, because no one has prepared anything to say, she is asked to dance. Armed with ‘an MA in contemporary dance and a deep desire to prove to my family I can be useful,’ as she puts it, Weinachter pliés, crawls, pounds the floor with her fists.
Yet when she pivots to her own fear of ‘being forgotten’, AFTER ALL gradually deepens. She stages her own eulogy, then touches on her grandmother’s death, curled up on the floor. At Spring Forward, when she got up again to waltz around a pool of light, tears flowed around me. As choreographic debuts go, this is one the dance world is unlikely to forget.
It’s just us and Solène Weinachter. She starts with stand-up jokes, and we’re laughing without thinking. Little by little, it becomes clear – she’s really talking about death.
Painful emotions are filtered through theatrical play, vocal storytelling and exquisite physicality. Everyone grieves in their own way – Weinachter takes us to the crematorium, into family encounters, and lets us witness a cheeky performance set to Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’.
What starts as comedy edges into elegy. The flowers Weinachter hands out at the start return at the end, thrown (on cue) onto the stage just before a big lamentation. It feels like the artist has taken us with her through the various stages of mourning.
AFTER ALL isn’t just a tribute, it’s a process. In the final scene, Weinachter circles a pool of light, bathed in music that warms the heart – a gentle ritual of closure. The atmosphere isn’t heavy, but tenderly cracked open. As we leave – perhaps with one more tear – we carry the lightness that settles in once everything has been truly felt.
The audience approves – dancer-choreographer Solène Weinachter is funny. Did you hear the story about her uncle’s funeral? Did you see her impression of the funeral director? She’s witty and charming, and at Spring Forward, the whole auditorium kept erupting with laughter.
Irony, humour and storytelling are a great set of skills for an entertainer, but they can also be like tinted windows – keeping us from seing ourselves and others clearly. Let’s be honest: Weinachter is Fleabag. She builds an excellent character and vivid imagery, but it never fully comes to life. She goes from talking to dancing, lies down stiff as a corpse, but it still feels like a stand-up routine. She cries, but the weeping session has no real snorts. By the end, she is spinning around herself like a planet orbiting her own life. Her honesty about it lets us – the audience – get close to her, but never truly close.
At the door, some audience members are handed a single red rose and asked to sit near the stage. Weinachter opens the show with a stand-up bit about her uncle’s funeral: a mic, a stool, and three columns of light set the scene. Speaking directly and casually, she conveys her family’s emotional awkwardness in the face of loss.
Fulfilling her father’s request, she begins a deliberately clumsy dance honoring her uncle, sparking laughter from shared discomfort. Many dancers recognise this random demand – to perform art in spaces that feel absurd. When the arts are treated as an afterthought, how can they still heal social fractures?
She builds invisible scenes through movement and absurdist humor, then shifts into a tableau that offers a striking contrast with the rest of the material: a physical wail, an exploration of crying-induced exhaustion, where every breath feels like the last.
After All asks: how do we let go – and how do we hold on when everything insists on ending?