Darshan Singh Bhuller © Phoenix Dance 'Planted Seeds' reviews recent Phoenix reviews more Jeffery Taylor reviews Web version held on Ballet.co by kind permission of Jeffery Taylor and the Sunday Express Express Website

Christian Serbian soldier Bosko Brkic and his Muslim girlfriend Admira Ismac went into history in 1993 as the Bosnian Romeo and Juliet when television pictures were beamed around the world of the tragic couple lying dead in each other's arms – gunned down only yards from safety. Following a visit to the war torn Sarajevo, former dancer Darshan Singh Bhuller five years ago choreographed a harrowing two part work celebrating the lovers’ union in life and death and the horror of rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing. Bhuller has revived Planted Seeds for the current UK tour of his new company, Phoenix Dance, and the impact is even more gut wrenching than the first time around. Even for Bhuller. “For a man to put his sperm into a woman as an act of vengeance screwed me up completely. That is pure evil,” he says, still shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s incomprehensible. I thought I had put it behind me, but with the steps all those terrible memories came flooding back.”

Planted Seeds opens with snapshots of apparently normal life in Sarajevo, kids dancing and flirting, with what is left of the older generation (veteran dancer Bob Smith, seedy but genial wearing black leather and a wide grin) joining in with avuncular gusto. The city’s simultaneous underbelly is the basement cell where four Muslim women are systematically raped by Smith and his henchmen. “If only to heal myself,” admits Bhuller, “I had to make a dance about what I had seen. You have to examine things on the dark side to understand them and I want my audiences to cross the

“I had to make a dance about what I had seen. You have to examine things on the dark side to understand them and I want my audiences to cross the bridge between good and evil because that gets rid of prejudice.” Darshan Singh Bhuller

bridge between good and evil because that gets rid of prejudice.” In Planted Seeds the sight of Smith, one minute the balding Christian friend, the next the gross abuser coldly observing his Muslim victim Tanya Richam-Odoi thrash like a electrified frog on a lab dish brings the intimacy of sectarian war chillingly home.

Bhuller, 41, was brought from Talvindi, an impoverished Punjabi border village, at the age of 6 to Chapeltown, Leeds, then one of Britain's most deprived inner-city areas, "My Dad came over first in 1964," he remembers, "to work in Leeds on the railways for a couple of years before bringing Ma and me over from India. He then worked for twenty years on building sites and though he hardly ever spoke about racial abuse, I know he suffered immensely." As a dance student in London, Bhuller was regularly spat at and called a Wog and worse, when out walking with white girlfriends, eventually being badly beaten by a roving pack of "Paki-bashers" near King's Cross station: "I was grateful the only weapons they had were their boots," he says.

Kevin Turner and Lisa Welham dance the lovers in Planted Seeds whose second half focuses on their story. Bhuller hints at the dark side when, after declaring their feelings, their friends on both sides of the religious divide spit self righteous spite and bigotry into their ears. Bhuller’s dance language is generous, big on movement and freely giving and Turner makes Bosko’s wooing of Admira breathtaking with both yearning intimacy and exuberant technique.

“I have such a nice life here in London with my family,” says Bhuller, a Sikh, who married his blonde, blue-eyed American wife, Sally in 1985, and dotes on daughters Sita, 16, and Sandip, 15. “I walk comfortably around this country and compare that with what people in Bosnia went through. What difference would it have made if Bosko and Admira were together in Sarajevo today? To destroy something so beautiful and pure by putting a bullet through their flesh - I just don't get it." Perhaps Planted Seeds will help others, at least, to understand.