Half-hidden between Hoxton and Stoke Newington, Dalston lacks their cachet but as its overflowing greengrocers’ stalls and flower shops testify, it has its own off-colour glamour. What used to be a pie-andeel shop is now a Chinese restaurant; what will it be next?

The composer Helen Chadwick lives in the area and pays it a moving tribute in Dalston Songs. Her source material is interviews with local, mostly immigrant residents. Some are refugees, others reject the label but for all of them the notion of “home” is complex, confused, deeply felt. Chadwick weaves their words into her libretto but also uses their actual voices, their richly accented English providing the foundation of her “a capella theatre song cycle”.

Not quite an opera, then, nor a ballet, although both forms are just a whisker away; Chadwick herself co-directs with choreographer Steven Hoggett. The setting is an authentically Dalstonian caff where four women make a song and dance out of choosing coffee; later they are joined by four men, one a loner, the others glued to their mobiles. Little by little they reveal themselves through the words they sing and the moves they make.

Most of the singers are British, and deliver Chadwick’s half-folk, half-classical vocal lines cleanly but with feeling. A rougher, perhaps tougher counterpoint comes from Soraya Mahdaoui, a Berber, and Nawroz Oramari, whose extraordinary Kurdish yodel pierces the heart. Not that everything is pain and anguish; a joyous paean to mashed potato makes sure of that.

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