Yang Liping: Under Siege review – beauty, blood and backflipping warlords

Sadler’s Wells, London
The storytelling can seem baffling in this tale of an ancient Chinese battle, but the show comes alive through its hallucinatory imagesIt’s hard to think of a more visually ravishing production this year than Yang Liping’s Under Siege. It’s based on the historic, bloody battle between Chinese warlords Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, but Yang and her designer Tim Yip have distilled the material down to images of hallucinatory beauty. Yip’s set is constr