Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic There is an apocryphal quotation which has been variously attributed to Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello and William S Burroughs: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” At first glance it appears smart, a snide elision of the extremely unlikely. The problem is that dancing about architecture is not really such an odd notion. The two have much in common: dance is about movement in space, buildings are about accommodating movement. Yet when Irish architects Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey are chatting about the spaces in their new Sadler’s Wells East building in London, which opens on February 6, they highlight a point of difference. “Dancers do not want anything except a box,” Tuomey says with a smile. “They are so conservative.”Apparently, dancers need to feel the four corners to be able to situate and orientate their bodies in a space effectively. They are using architecture as a framework against which they perform.The resulting Sadler’s Wells East complex is, then, not an extravagant blockbuster, but rather a cluster of boxes, a hefty, grounded brick container; urban, almost industrial. And very deliberate. It is sited in east London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a neighbourhood that was once heavily industrialised, a dense brown and grey quilt of factories, tanneries, smokestacks and workshops around rivers, canals and snaking railway lines. That industrial character is clearly referenced in this new building and, though it might be a bit of a cliché in contemporary cultural infrastructure, it works because these kinds of buildings for performance are, in themselves, a form of industrial architecture. There are the truck access roads and loading bays, the pulleys and rigs of the lighting and sound systems, the machinery of the fly towers and the huge doors for stage sets. The backstage area of the dance house is now more industrial than almost any of the other building in surrounding Stratford.Unlike a factory, though, this cluster of brick volumes has been made welcoming, starting with the massive red “You are Welcome” neon signs over the entrances. The ground floor features a long bar and café area that wraps around the site, enveloping it in social space, with a long concrete bench set into the outside wall. It softens the site well; without it, this might have been a pretty stark building. Its rear wall, for instance, inspired by fragments of the city walls of Rome, is a great cliff of brick, with some enigmatic bulges protruding from its flatness. Along with its neighbours, the bleak-looking new BBC Music Studios and another O’Donnell + Tuomey building in the strange squid-shape of the new V&A East, these arts buildings create a kind of cultural wall butting up to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It is being self-consciously branded as “East Bank”, a new counterpart to London’s South Bank built at a cost of £674.6mn It’s informative to think about the differences. When the South Bank was built in the 1960s and ’70s, it was a bastion against the decaying remains of industry and a pioneering venture into a part of London that would inevitably regenerate. For Stratford, the Olympics played that role and the East Bank looks like a bulwark against the encroachment of generic, globalised investment housing towers.Sadler’s Wells already has a big dance theatre, a place that grew out of a “Musick House” in a 17th-century pleasure garden between Islington and Clerkenwell. Like the V&A, it has expanded eastward, chasing new audiences, perhaps younger, perhaps more diverse. This new building will allow them to provide a much greater spread of performance as well as providing facilities to visiting dance companies from across the UK.At its heart is a 550-capacity hall, its seats (a little surprisingly) on retractable but reassuringly solid bleachers. The adaptability of its seating allows for rapid switching of formats (even during an interval), so that an audience may, for instance, find themselves seated for one part and standing in a huge hall for the next. It is a space that will bring London into line with other European cities where dance is better catered for.This hall occupies about half of the volume of the site, but a complex massing of other spaces wraps tightly around it. Those include six new studios, the largest of which is the same size as the main hall’s stage area. It is in these that the factory-style sawtooth roof profile appears, admitting natural light into the spaces. Most also have access to outside space, to terraces and balconies so that the dancers can grab a little fresh air (the studios are heated to 26C to reduce strains on muscle and potential injury). It might also animate the exterior, giving this hefty chunk of brick and concrete a bit of a buzz.There are a few curious quirks in the architecture. First, though least visible, is a massive acoustic separation space between the main hall and the smaller one directly above it, to prevent sound from leaking between the two spaces. This helps to pile up the bulk, giving the whole ensemble more presence on the burgeoning skyline. And there is the curious facade to Carpenters Road at the rear, a brick escarpment that betrays the architects’ interest in brutalism and the late modernism of the 1970s. The interiors have been done well: from the bars and stairs to the lavatories and the landings, it feels like a generous, modern public space of the kind built in London in the mid 20th century, such as the National Theatre, Festival Hall or Barbican.This is a building sited amid a weird architectural menagerie, squeezed between the one-time Olympic stadium (now home to West Ham United football club), Zaha Hadid’s fluid and wonderful London Aquatics Centre (surely the grandest municipal pool in the country) and the vast, messy, garish mass of the Westfield shopping centre through which it is approached. It needs to be tough to stand up to this visual cacophony — and it is. This is an architecture that reflects the choreography of London, enabling the city to dance in and around it in ways not yet, perhaps, fully defined.sadlerswells.com
