Barbican centre

Too much ballet these days is top-heavy with narrative that would be better served by the spoken word than it is by body language. And too few choreographers know how to engage with music, rather than using it as a mere sonic backdrop. So what a blessed relief it was to encounter Pam Tanowitz’s utterly delightful Pastoral, which is guilty of neither of these failings. I enjoyed it so much that I was compelled to go back and see it again, at my own considerable expense, two days later. Pastoral lasts for an hour or so, but seems to ignore tick-tock time: it is both simple and complex, naive and sophisticated.

The last Yana-speaker in the world died in 1916. When Ishi was born, the Yana were still a small but healthy collection of tribes ranging the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where they lived off what they could hunt and the salmon they caught in the rivers. But gold had been discovered in California and every year tens of thousands of settlers were arriving to stake out a claim. When Ishi was four years old, there was a massacre of Yana people near what’s now Mill Creek; Ishi’s father was one of the people killed. The last few survivors disappeared into the hills. The white settlers never encountered them again; as far as they knew the Yana had been wiped out.