Silent screams, Akram Khan’s “Creature” and bad trends in British ballet choreography

Bad choreography comes in many forms. In English ballet, however, it often tumbles into one or other of two main categories, both of them cherished by local critics and audiences. The first genre is about choreography as a vision (often intensely academic and misunderstood as classical) of controlled puppets, with women being systematically over-partnered by men and with both sexes going through well-structured academic routines like automata. The second and older genre is about choreography as expressionism, earnestly and repeatedly making strenuous points, applying gestural effects like sledgehammers. (The example that makes me cringe most is an exit for the Betrayed Girl’s Mother in Ninette de Valois’s The Rake’s Progress. As this mother slowly shuffles off, she shakes her fist no fewer than eight times at the Rake, stamping as she shakes it. I don’t mind the gesture once; it’s the repetition that’s icky.)

Neither category is necessarily bad in itself. Mayerling (1978), Kenneth MacMillan’s greatest ballet (for all its obvious flaws), takes the physical manipulation of women through new extremes - but it shows those women as willing participants rather than toys or victims. Mayerling also makes emphatic use of expressionistic gesture, with Crown Prince Rudolf repeatedly clamping a hand to his temples in pain - but that helps to make Rudolf’s torment a core ingredient of his insoluble nexus of torment. La Fin du jour, made the following year, is one of MacMillan’s ultimate depictions of humans as dancing dolls, ultra-chic but toy-like, as if people themselves had become part of the Machine Age: MacMillan manages to make it peculiarly poetic.

In several of MacMillan’s worst ballets, however, physical/sexual manipulation abounds alongside jerkily synchronised dance routines (dancers as marionettes); in others, the manipulation is part of his coarsely expressionist vision of anguish.

Silent screams and the gesture of clutching a tense hand to the tormented head were both clichés before MacMillan came along. (For the silent scream, some see Anna Sokolow’s 1950s dances as a notorious source. Others invoke Helene Weigel’s famous 1949 performance in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage - though Brecht seems to have already asked for the scream in his 1939 script. Yet others relate that the German modernist dancer-choreographer Mary Wigman had already employed silent screams in her work before 1939. (Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer have written to say “To the best of our mutual knowledge the first silent scream in ballet was Jean Börlin’s as the Madman in the Cubist Skating Rink of 1922 by De Mare’s Ballets Suedois in Paris. Later that year George Balanchine, still in Petrograd, used a silent scream at the end of his Sibelius solo Valse Triste wirh his then muse Lydia Ivanova. Both these screams were documented by critics at the time and understood by the public as a silent film convention.” Thomas Kampe adds, “And then Valeska Gert created her whole dance Der Todt as a single silent scream. Filmed in 1925 by Suse Byk.” My thanks.) And Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream is always seen as an overall influence.) MacMillan, however, certainly upped the silent-scream quota very considerably. And the British have gone on acclaiming him for it - while mercifully dropping a great many of his lesser creations from repertory.

Jann Parry’s important biography of MacMillan has the title Different Drummer (2009). But MacMillan’s own 1984 ballet of that name, his adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (a play written in the mid-1830s), was among his least expressively coherent and emotionally overwrought conceptions, with multiple expressionistic devices recycled.

Christopher Wheeldon’s breakthrough ballet, Polyphonia (2001) is a highly sophisticated example of the puppet genre, with choreographic motifs taken from Ashton and Balanchine but arranged with immense organisational skill. The late Liam Scarlett’s breakthrough ballet, Asphodel Meadows (2010) was another example of skilful puppetry: British critics and audiences rushed to anoint its maker. (Some early signs suggest that Valentino Zucchetti is the next in this puppet-manipulation line, but his career is at an early stage.) Wheeldon and Scarlett, both among MacMillan’s stylistic offspring, have shown their expressionist sides: see the role of Leontes in Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale (2014) and - although little Scarlett choreography currently survives his recent death - Scarlett’s Sweet Violets (2012, a strange, remarkable, and muted exploration of the sex killings of the London of Jack the Ripper and Walter Sickert), and Frankenstein (2016, a full-length ballet of Mary Shelley’s novel of that name).

All this modern history arises in context of Akram Khan’s new two-act Creature, which had its premiere at Sadler’s Wells last week with English National Ballet. (I saw Saturday 25’s performance. It runs until Saturday 2. https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/english-national-ballet-creature-by-akram-khan/) Although I saw - and was immediately impressed by - some of Khan’s early choreography in 2002, I’ve only seen a few examples since. And it’s a surprise to find that his Creature might have been choreographed by the vengeful ghosts of MacMillan and Scarlett in tandem. Here’s a full-throttle venture into the crude, repetitious expressionism explored by these other choreographers - and, guess what, it’s a conflation of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Büchner’s Woyzeck.

Choreographic clichés start soon; they prove innumerable. The many silent screams are the crudest and most obvious of all. Then there are the clutchings of the head with gestures of torment, followed here (as in Mayerling and other works) with the torso pulling the gesture and head down. The whole corps de ballet keeps re-crossing the stage while re-cycling a few heavily gestural phrases, slowly pushing, pulling, and heaving. Act Two opens with the protagonist shuddering from head to toe: which strongly recalls MacMillan’s re-enactment of the Nazi death camps in Valley of Shadows (1983). At the end, Creature has a pas de deux with the lifeless body of his beloved Marie. (How many British ballets have there now been in which women’s dead or dying bodies are lifted and supported by men?)

My knowledge of Khan’s work has been sporadic and intermittent, but I’m dismayed to find him, in Creature, becoming the lowest common denominator of what the critic Chris Savage-King, in a memorable 1983 essay in Dance Theatre Journal on MacMillan’s Valley of Shadows, called “post-expressionism”. There are odd grace notes Khan adds, like the collective pas de chat danced by the ensemble, which initially add a welcome note of surprise - until Khan repeats and repeats them. There’s a bludgeoning emphasis here that I never noticed in Khan’s early work.

The most interesting feature of the production is Ruth Little’s dramaturgy, which yokes the Frankenstein-Woyzeck double-whammy to a view of space travel, escaping this planet’s doomed ecostructure, and larger cosmic doom. The score, a messy mixture of tape and live music by Vincenzo Lamagna (with orchestration by James Keane), starts with Richard Nixon’s voice congratulating Neil Armstrong for walking on the moon; but a broken-down version of his voice returns at the end of the production, to suggest a larger disintegration of both government and travel beyond this world. In between, we get a chunk of Ravel’s Bolero and several orchestral crescendi so hysterically overblown that they make Rossini’s once outrageous ones pale into timidity. Tim Yip’s costumes move smoothly between eras, but his set ends with another cliché, the decor that falls apart as the show ends. This trend goes back to the cataclysmic ends of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (1876) and Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère (1877), if not further, but during the 1990s the Stephen Daldry An Inspector Calls and Theatre de Complicité’s Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol initiated it as a new trend. (Over twenty years ago, theatre-goers, beholding the final debris onstage, were often heard to remark, “Well, I wouldn’t want to be the stage-hand who has to put that set together again before the next performance.”)

Jeffrey Cirio, a superb performer whom I remember with both Boston Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, plays the Creature with wild intensity. He achieves the paradoxical condition of seeming the freest person onstage, but the choreography still makes him and everyone else fatally limited. And all those silent screams become an image for his own plight: he’s trapped by tedious choreography and can’t get out. Can Akram Khan himself get out of this dire and very British quagmire?

Monday 27 September

1: Jeffrey Cirio, as Creature, emitting one of the many silent screams of Akram Khan’s “Creature”, new at Sadler’s Wells on Thursday 23 and seen by me on Saturday 25. Photograph: Tristram Kenton.

2: Cirio as Creature, silently screaming yet again. Left, Fabian Reimar as Captain. Centre, Ken Saruhashi as Major. Right: Stina Quagebeur as Doctor. Photograph: Alastair Muir.