Nine Sixteenths, a devised work by Paula Varjack, is currently touring the UK and was performed at the Aldridge Studio at The Lowry. With further dates planned in Leeds and London, and an evident trajectory towards festival development, the piece already feels like work in motion—gathering ideas, audiences, and urgency as it travels.
Performed by Varjack alongside four other performers, the show is a five-strong ensemble of Black women, with a British Sign Language interpretive artist fully integrated into the action rather than positioned at its edge. That integration matters: it aligns with the production’s wider concern with who gets seen, who gets heard, and how meaning is carried across different bodies and modes of communication.
The piece opens on a note of personal memory. Varjack recalls growing up with Top of the Pops (Top of the Pops), watching it every Thursday at 7pm and copying the dance routines she saw on screen. These were not just casual impressions of pop culture, but structured rituals—learned with a best friend, practised, corrected, and sometimes fought over when the steps didn’t land quite right. It is a simple but effective starting point: performance as something absorbed long before it is consciously understood as performance.
From there, the show widens its lens. Varjack moves into American high school culture, especially football games, but not for the sport itself. Instead, attention is fixed on the cheerleaders—their precision, repetition, and tightly controlled group movement. These sequences become formative, shaping an early understanding of choreography as discipline, spectacle, and belonging all at once.
But Nine Sixteenths is not simply autobiographical. It steadily builds into a broader cultural investigation: how Black women are represented, circulated, and judged across popular media, and whether anything meaningful has shifted in the last 25 years. The show moves between pop music, television history, and digital culture, asking difficult questions about visibility—what it means to be seen more often, but not necessarily seen differently.
A central reference point throughout is Janet Jackson. Her story repeatedly resurfaces, becoming the structural spine of the piece. The 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime incident involving Jackson and Justin Timberlake is not treated as a standalone moment, but as a cultural hinge—one that exposes how blame, attention, and narrative are unevenly distributed. The question the show keeps returning to is blunt and persistent: why her, and not him?
From there, the work expands into audience behaviour itself. It examines how quickly judgement forms, how images are replayed, and how repetition shapes public memory. Earlier moments use humour to offset the density of this analysis, especially through references to early internet culture and the mechanics of viral media.
One key reference is the interview between David Letterman and Janet Jackson, used to explore what the show frames as audience “demand”—the constant need to know, replay, and rewatch. Varjack suggests that without platforms like YouTube, many of these moments would not have achieved the same cultural afterlife. The implication is simple but unsettling: digital repetition does not just preserve history, it intensifies it, looping certain figures and narratives far beyond their original context.
The ensemble structure is one of the production’s strengths. Varjack and the four other performers share narration, movement, and perspective, avoiding a single authoritative voice. Meaning emerges collectively, through repetition, overlap, and interruption. The British Sign Language interpreter is fully embedded within this rhythm, contributing to the flow of meaning rather than translating from its margins.
In its final section, the tone shifts noticeably. The performers move into something closer to interior voice—less performed, more exposed. There is a sense of frustration beneath the structure, even exhaustion, as they reflect on being seen but not fully recognised, and on whether there is still meaningful space for them as Black women and artists within contemporary culture. That question lands without resolution, but with weight.
Despite the show’s political edge and intellectual density, it closes on a strikingly direct and communal moment: a performance of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation. It reframes her not only as a reference point but as a symbolic centre of the work itself—discipline, control, resistance, and pop spectacle all held together in one cultural figure. The audience response is warm and immediate, suggesting recognition as much as appreciation.
What lingers after leaving is not clarity, but friction. The piece deliberately resists neat conclusions, instead leaving viewers with questions that continue to echo outside the theatre. In this case, that echo extended beyond the auditorium: there is a lingering urge to check, to verify, to rewatch. For a Gen Z audience member, that impulse quickly turns into something familiar—opening YouTube, searching for the original moment, trying to reconcile memory with mediated history.
That reaction feels entirely in keeping with what Nine Sixteenths is doing. It is a show about repetition—of images, narratives, blame, and attention—and about how understanding is often constructed after the fact, through replay rather than presence. It asks what it means to inherit cultural moments you didn’t fully live through, but are still shaped by.
Ultimately, Nine Sixteenths is less about offering answers than exposing patterns: of representation, of consumption, and of how quickly stories harden when they are replayed enough times. It is challenging, thought-provoking, and emotionally charged, but also clear in its central concern—how Black women are seen, and how often that seeing still comes with distortion.
Reviewer - Kathryn Gorton
On - 8th May 2026
