The Royal Ballet’s 2024 Festival of New Choreography
<Two reviews first published in “Slipped Disc” during February 2024. At short notice, I was unable to see the Festival’s final item, a programme of “Duets” in the Clore Studio on February 25.>
I - February 11.
The word “festival” suggests a celebration. This month, the Royal Ballet is presenting a Festival of New Choreography. Here’s hoping that the festival leaves us seeing serious new possibilities for ballet as an art form. But its opening item, “Dark with Excessive Bright”, isn’t just a (superficially pretty) anthology of clichés – it reminded me how horrid, how dated, and how boring ballet itself can be.
“Dark with Excessive Bright,” the work of the Canadian choreographer Robert Binet, occurs in the Linbury Studio Theatre, lasting forty-five minutes. Its one memorable device is that it stages three simultaneous dances in separate areas of the floor, so that the audience can either watch the whole from an upper balcony or parts at close quarters. This is nothing new: at Tate Modern in 2003, Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) presented an Event on three simultaneous stages, and went on to present subsequent Events on multiple stages for the rest of his career. The difference is that Cunningham’s simultaneous dances were thrillingly unalike and all first-rate.
Binet – who has been choreographic associate to the National Ballet of Canada – isn’t without talent: in 2015, his “The Blue of Distance”, for New York City Ballet to Ravel piano pieces, was a changing landscape that often showed speed, slowness, and stillness simultaneously (and musically) on one stage. Here he gives us three stages on which everything is tedious, unoriginal, lethargic, precious, interchangeable, and wretchedly mannered, with many laboured demonstrations of “sensitivity”. The eleven dancers wear body tights in various shades of beige flesh tones; the men’s torsos are also clad in coloured but translucent veils. The music, by Missy Mazzoli, is drearily precious. Some of it is played live by a pianist and (at one point close to the stage) five string players: all of it is about mere surface effects.
Piquée arabesque, the épaulé arm gesture forward into space, the manège of piqué turns, the forward bend from the waist, the small assemblé jump – there’s no harm in showing us these familiar parts of the ballet vocabulary. Binet, however, gives us whole phrases consisting of nothing else. A few dancers – Reece Clarke, Nicol Edmonds, Anna Rose O’Sullivan – delivered their dreary movements with admirable honest-to-goodness simplicity, but too many (even the usually marvellous Joseph Sissens) did them with misguided facial displays of deep feeling.
In particular, “Dark with Excessive Bright” allows people,to see at close quarters how clunky the Royal Ballet’s current point shoes are, with women’s blocked shoes seemingly sawn off to make the foot look not pointed but crudely truncated, as if by hostile carpentry or amputation. (To make matters worse, the edges of the “point” area are now sewn into a frayed look that suggested wood-shavings.) This is not how the shoes of other important ballet companies look; it is antithetical to the elegant illusion that ballet pointwork has been all about.
Heaven knows I have no objections to men lifting other men as well as women. This has become not only a hallmark of twentyfirst-century ballet but one of the few ways in which ballet echoes those western societies in which same-sex relationships are now open. And yet Binet makes it look mere tokenism.
At no point do men and women execute the same movements side by side; at no point does the footwork of men and women ever resemble one another. (And isn’t it time we saw male pointwork? With those hewn-galosh pointshoes, Covent Garden is all set to lead the way.) The stage society here never suggests equality in the workplace. The dancers here look like some singular species in the zoo, never like people in the modern world outside.
II - February 16.
What’s bold about this February’s Festival of New Choreography at Covent Garden is that the Royal Ballet hasn’t asked its leading house choreographers – Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon – to contribute. The season would be better labelled Choreographers New Here; and the company is taking a real risk. (It’s also lowered its prices considerably. Seats usually costing over £100 cost less than £50 this time.) The four pieces of the main house’s new quadruple bill have been created by people making their house debuts as choreographers. Each ballet is introduced by a short black-and-white film that, briefly and sensibly, introduces us to the choreographer and to her or his notions of what she or he intends. This (a device often used in New York since 2008) is effective: it does much to get us on side before the choreography even begins.
Given the premise of such a quadruple bill in 2024, you could have predicted that two works would be by women, that at least one would be by a person of colour, that all the choreographers would be well under fifty years of age, that we would see some same-sex partnering, and that any work by a choreographer trained in the Royal Ballet would be madly busy. And yes, on Thursday, you’d have been right.
None of the new quartet is superlative, but the South African choreographer Mthuthzeli November’s “For What It’s Worth” is the most large-spirited and most refreshing: Mayara Magri leads a cast of three men and five other women, who bend, arch, and travel in all directions around the stage, using their torsos as vividly as their arms and legs. It’s also the most beautifully dressed, with marvellously bright combinations of contrasting colours in gorgeous fabric.
November (pictured) makes two mistakes in his filmed interview: he implies he’s new to ballet, whereas he has worked at Ballet Black and with various other British ballet dancers; and he speaks of taking inspiration from music by Miriam Makeba (“Mother Africa” as he admirably calls her), whereas the score he uses, by himself and Alex Wilson, sounds largely European in its metres and textures. He also makes the mistake of over-fancy lighting by Zeynep Kapekli, who keeps distracting us with a rig of sixteen orange lights that descend and rise, tiresomely. Still, “For What It’s Worth” is a highly appealing essay in generosity and intensity, all skilfully paced. And it has a good sense of both ballet footwork and of how ballet can address space while releasing the human spirit.
Much more flawed, but also appealing, is the American choreographer Jessica Lang’s “Twinkle”, in which the pianist Kate Shipway plays the Brahms Wiegenlied and Mozart’s variations on “Ah vous dirai-je, maman” (“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”). Lang says she knows the Brahms is a lullaby, yet she gives William Bracewell a solo to it that’s all allegro activity, as if Lang were not inducing sleep but, like Macbeth, murdering it. I suppose “Twinkle” is a somewhat better title than the late Sean Lavery’s often-revived “Twinkliana” ballet (1990) to the same Mozart, but Lang’s dances pay less (a lot less) heed to the enchanting range of rhythmic and harmonic games that Mozart’s variations conjure from the old tune. Lang too often encourages her Royal Ballet dancers to be cute (something to be avoided at all times), with high-fives and eager grins. And when prima Fumi Kaneko wields her super-bright smile across the Royal Opera House, as she plentifully does here, the spectacle is fierce, synthetic, and terrifying.
Even so, there are many happy moments during “Twinkle”: travelling and rhythmic dance moments (some of them casually and pleasantly same-sex). I hope I’m right to identify Sae Maeda as the most enchanting of the four women soloists, but Lang gives highly individualised and often challenging solos to all her cast of ten.
Kaneko’s partner, Bracewell, looking nearly naked in a flesh-toned top and white tights, is never cute but always animated. All the personality he has emerges through his wonderfully varied and vividly elegant dancing. “Twinkle”, unimportant but highly affable, believes in its dancers, on the whole rewardingly.
Those two ballets occur after the interval. The programme opens with the British born Gemma Bond’s “Boundless”, which is busy in the most tiresome British way (even though Bond has lived and worked in America most of this century) to a singularly hard, rapid, unappealing, and brass-heavy score by Joey Roukens, “In Unison” (it’s not in unison, of course). Bond is not without sophistication: she knows much about the spatially complex traffic-control aspect of choreography, and she keeps emphatically nailing her dance rhythm onto the music’s rhythm. And so what?
Better, I suppose, is the Netherlands choreographer Joshua Junker’s “Never Known”, which is earnest and mainly about groups in space, with imagery that suggests a totalitarian state where people have little liberty. Even when two men get to dance alone together, they lack freedom, let alone joy.
It’s impressive how often “Never Known” has its dancers facing upstage – ballet tends to be shy of that – and Junkers is so skilled in traffic control that it’s often remarkably hard to count how many dancers are onstage. But even when these people are facing out front, they seem faceless, and lack scale. They also lack footwork. The music, by Nils Frahm and Vikingur Ólafsson, is taped and technological. The dancing looks taped, too.
Thursday night’s audience contained a greater number of young people, and people of colour, than your average Royal Ballet attendees. The programme teaches an important lesson: good choreography is less about moving people cleverly in time and space than it is about quality of spirit. That’s a lesson the Royal Ballet has often chosen to ignore, but here’s hoping. “For What It’s Worth” has much to teach.
@Alastair Macaulay 2024
