Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent. Between some highlights of the most familiar Fokine repertory, an extract from Nijinska’s Les Biches has oddly been inserted, and there was nothing here to suggest the fact that Massine was by far the most dominant choreographer of the Ballets Russes’s interwar era and someone indeed who had personally worked with BRB in its previous incarnation. A missed opportunity, surely, and is it too much to hope that one day we might see classics such as La Boutique fantasque or Le Tricorne again?
BRB can draw on only modest resources. The orchestra was prerecorded, there was only the sketchiest of attempts to render the glories of Benois and Bakst’s designs, and an ensemble made up of young graduate dancers at the start of their careers had been assigned some tough stylistic challenges. One couldn’t expect them to redeem the Schéhérazade pas de deux from preposterous silent-movie camp, or to make much of the subtle, sophisticated satire of manners that underlies Les Biches.
Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile and enjoyable enterprise that delivered some spirited performances: Alisa Garkavenko threw off some thrilling grands jetés as The Firebird, Jack Easton attacked Nijinsky’s showpiece role in Le Spectre de la rose with verve, and Garkavenko and Tom Hazelby led a charming reading of Les Sylphides that had been honourably and sensitively rehearsed. And what a relief it was, incidentally, to hear Chopin’s score for the latter – well played by a solo pianist Jeanette Wong – rather than in the customary form of Roy Douglas’s tasteless and redundant orchestral arrangement.
Two programmes of contemporary work briefly seen at the Queen Elizabeth Hall impressed me greatly, not least because of the phenomenal energy, stamina, discipline and concentration of the dancers involved. What astonishing creatures they are, and how do they remember it all, even when the music is too repetitive to serve as a cue for their muscle memories?
The German choreographer Sasha Waltz has given a team of 11 the challenge of moving through an hour-long iteration of Terry Riley’s partially improvised In C – a seminal piece of orchestral minimalism, both simple and complex in its structure, expertly interpreted here by the London Sinfonietta. Each individual seems largely absorbed in his or her own refracted response to the musical motifs – doing their own thing, one might say, like children in a playground – but they collide or coalesce at intervals, apparently by chance, forming patterns, groups and encounters of momentary harmony and unity. No scenery, no emotional trajectory, but subtle modulations of lighting and mood make it hypnotic.
Wasted for most of the last couple of years touring a mediocre money-spinner of a ballet based on Peaky Blinders, Rambert has recently collaborated more fruitfully with the Marseille-based group (LA)HORDE. The result is a physically stunning display of street and club dance of almost ferocious intensity and unsmiling attitude. Amid the bombardment of pelvic thrusting, dry humping, borderline sexual abuse and sweaty mosh-pit bolshiness, there’s not much charm and a total absence of grace notes. Everything is semaphored, nothing implied. Perhaps the underlying aesthetic is not all that original – Wim Vandekeybus was stomping about on similar territory 30 years ago – but the frenzied Dionysiac dedication with which the cast collectively surrender their bodies to the techno pulses makes the spectacle utterly enthralling.
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