danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

London Report

London summer fare: The Kirov Ballet, Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet

by Jane Simpson
copyright © 2001 by Jane Simpson
Autumn 2001

Two seasons after the reopening of the Royal Opera House, the management is still not able to afford enough performances to keep the theatre open into the summer. Next year we are promised a longer season, but meanwhile impresario Victor Hochhauser took over for a couple of months, staging a rich programme of ballet which was interrupted only by two weeks of overpriced and under-achieved opera from the Kirov.

Even opera critics agree that the Kirov Ballet is currently in much better shape than its sister company. Towards the end of a generally successful visit they gave us an all-Balanchine evening: we’ve seen their Symphony in C before, but their Serenade and Apollo were new to London. Of the three, it was Serenade which had the strongest Russian accent, with more than a hint of sylphs and wilis noticeable in the famous opening sequence for the corps de ballet. In the two casts, both Janna Ayupova and Svetlana Zacharova gave an individual charm to the Waltz, and Maya Dumchenko —in the Russian movement on both nights—had an appealing warmth as well as earning my deepest gratitude by wearing soft shoes. All the other women, in all three ballets, hit the stage with a clunk at every step.

Apollo was a disappointment. The Kirov uses the older, longer version, but made such a hash of the opening scene that I wished they hadn’t. Neither of the two Apollos seemed anything like ideal – Igor Zelensky too humanly ordinary for a god, Adrian Fadeyev way, way over the top. Zacharova, though rather lightweight, could become a fine Terpsichore: so too could Veronika Part, but only if she were allowed to let her own character dictate the interpretation. As it was, she appeared to have been sent on with instructions to smile without stopping and to act flirtatious, and the result was not nice to watch. Fortunately Symphony in C came over very well, with pleasing performances from several soloists (including Part in the second movement), so we went home happy in the end.

Following the Kirov into the theatre, the Royal Ballet restricted itself to a popular programme, starting with Swan Lake and Coppélia and ending with a mixed bill designed as a final farewell to Anthony Dowell’s directorship. Built round six of his most famous roles, the evening was stronger on memories of past glories than it was on present accomplishment. Most successful in present day terms was The Dream, a great relief after a substandard performance earlier in the season. The two Oberons I saw, Johan Kobborg and Carlos Acosta, had the initial advantage that they both looked wonderful in the costume, and Kobborg in particular was well on the way to an excellent character study. The really surprising thing was that both of them—dancers in the top flight of today’s technical wizards—clearly found the choreography really hard work. The 21-year old Dowell must indeed have been a phenomenon. Leanne Benjamin is a satisfying Titania in a sexy, sulky fashion, and Sarah Wildor has Sibley’s capriciousness and more than her musicality. (Wildor’s sudden resignation, two weeks after Ross Stretton’s arrival, is a loss I can hardly bear to think about.) Both the Pucks I saw had the cuteness level fairly well under control, and Luke Heydon could be an excellent Bottom if he didn’t try quite so hard – his dance on pointe, for instance, was less effective for being perfectly secure: it’s not meant to be a virtuoso showpiece.

The centre section of this programme had Ashton’s Monotones ll (the white trio), with Christina Arestis in the second cast giving the best performance I’ve seen for years, surrounded by a set of completely unrelated pas de deux. Ashton’s ‘Awakening’ duo, made for a long ago production of Sleeping Beauty, is a drifting, romantic piece, designed round the fluency and style of Sibley and Dowell. Even as charmingly danced as it was by Belinda Hatley and Robert Parker (a guest from Birmingham Royal Ballet), without its creators it seemed too lightweight to live out of context. The Don Quixote pas de deux brought some surprising contrasts. The glamorous first cast, Tamara Rojo and Acosta, brought every last ounce of virtuosity to it but to curiously subdued effect. Rojo had her characterisation on such a tight rein that I longed to see her just let go and enjoy the fun. The much less starry Miyako Yoshida and Inaki Urlezaga were actually more enjoyable, and Urlezaga, I have to say, confounded my previous view of him by producing some tricks of his own that—whilst not in Acosta’s class—were way beyond what I’d thought he could do. (And this in a season when he was expected still to be weeks away from a return to the stage after breaking his ankle and his wrist in a horrendous fall through an open trap door!)

It was with the last ballet, A Month in the Country, that things went really wrong. Christopher Saunders and David Drew, as the two older men, were there to remind us of what it used to look like, but nobody else lived up to memories of earlier casts. The role of Vera, the young girl, is one of the rare ones where real youth and inexperience score higher than even the best acting. Ashton made it on a complete unknown from the corps de ballet, and Alina Cojocaru, though she has the youth, is already too far down the road to stardom; and besides, she was more or less extinguished under a wig that made her look like Becky Sharp at thirty. Sylvie Guillem, in Lynn Seymour’s role, gave a performance that was much admired by many but seemed to me fatally flawed in its conception. She thinks too much, and it shows: her characterisations come from her head rather than from her heart or her guts. For this particular one she has invented a woman who is sophisticated, ironic and self-aware: in itself, an intelligent and consistent construct, but simply not the woman imagined by Ashton. The result is a constant tension between her acting and the choreography, coming to a head in the great pas de deux at the end of the ballet when I simply could not believe that this Natalia was capable of the feelings described by the steps; and the ballet fell apart.

All of Guillem’s usual partners—Cope, Hilaire and Le Riche—being either ill or injured, the tutor (Dowell’s role) was done by Massimo Murru, a principal dancer from La Scala whose only claim to the part seems to be that he happened to be dancing with Guillem in her Giselle at the time. According to his CV he has never done a step of Ashton in his life, and it does seem hard that Guillem is allowed to import whomever she pleases, rather than turning to one of the several young men in the Royal Ballet who should be able to handle the role, and who would benefit immensely from the experience. As it turned out Murru wasn’t bad, but even if he’d been magnificent I still think it was wrong in principle.

In its early days, Month in the Country was a perfect example of ensemble playing, and perhaps the most distressing thing was that this sense of community had all but disappeared. This, on top of an apparent lack of care in details (what had happened to Saunders’ hat? why didn’t Murru have a hat at all? why was Guillem allowed her ‘bare legs and invisible shoes’ look in a ballet where everyone else is formally dressed?) sent me home feeling more angry and disappointed than I can ever remember.

The San Francisco Ballet made many friends during their Sadler’s Wells season in 1999, and their return visit, with an enticing programme, was keenly anticipated. I hope the company wasn’t too disappointed that they couldn’t fill the larger auditorium at Covent Garden, coming as they did at the very end of the season, but I’d guess that even so they played to enough people to have more than sold out Sadler’s Wells. There was perhaps rather less unanimous enthusiasm, too, but that again was to be expected – the honeymoon is over and we are settling down to look more closely at both dancers and repertoire.

Out of the thirteen ballets they showed, Jerome Robbins’ Fanfare, was the one real failure. I admired the décor and the commitment of the dancers but it’s a very lightweight piece and was completely sunk by the narration—a real embarrassment. That over with, though, the rest of the first programme was very meaty, taking in the new Mark Morris, A Garden, Yuri Possokhov’s Magrittomania, and Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements. I loved the Morris at the time, though it leaves only a slight memory of elegance and invention; the Magritte ballet, on the other hand, leaves very clear images. It had a genuine success and gave Yuan Yuan Tan much her best role of the week. I was completely taken aback by the first movement of the Balanchine, which was danced so cheerfully that I found it almost unrecognisable from the aggressive, rather menacing way I’ve always seen it before. The second movement pas de deux was well done by Julie Diana and (especially) Pierre-Francois Vilanoba, but the other solo roles looked rather undercast.

The most keenly anticipated piece in the whole season was Christopher Wheeldon’s Sea Pictures—besides being ‘one of ours’, he’s acquired a huge reputation in the States, and we were all hoping he would live up to it. So, almost of course, it was something of a disappointment. It’s a very difficult piece of music: for one thing there’s an almost unbridgeable gap in quality between what Elgar wrote and the rather odd poems he chose to set, more noticeable than usual thanks to the clarity of mezzo Diana Moore’s pronunciation. Relative to the strength of feeling in the words, I thought Wheeldon had rather underdone the drama, so that when the Joanna Berman character drowned herself at the end it came as something of a surprise—we didn’t know she was that unhappy. But some of the choreography was ravishing, especially the pas de deux for Berman and Possokhov in the first movement, and I liked the sea imagery pervading the whole piece: I remember the dancers rolling like pebbles caught in the receding waves. Most interesting of all, though, was to see a work so strongly influenced by Ashton.

Of Helgi Tomasson’s own choreography, I was pleased to see again the Chaconne he showed on the company’s first visit. Either the context or the performance made it seem much more purposeful and solid than before, even despite the distraction of fire-warning lights flashing all round the auditorium—we were all put out into the street immediately afterwards whilst a small backstage problem was dealt with. I was much less happy, though, with Prism. Set to Beethoven’s first Piano Concerto, it’s pleasant enough but much too far inside the comfort zone for my taste. To use music like this you need either to be a genius or to take a much more edgy, even contrary approach, and too often I felt that Tomasson was just passing the time. The last movement sets out to be spectacular but doesn’t deliver—he keeps setting up for the soloist to knock our socks off but then does something quite ordinary. It does show the company off well, though, with both Long in the first movement and Gonzalo Garcia in the last looking strong and at ease. The pas de deux in the slow movement goes on much too long (blame Beethoven) and had me really irritated by Lucia Lacarra’s over-studied dancing—there’s something narcissistic about such very careful placing of each pose, however beautiful the end result may be.

Julie Diana’s Night in the same programme, was another success, much appreciated by the audience. It’s good to see such an original piece—extremely well danced by Tina LeBlanc—put on with such little fuss. No sets, all the effects achieved by clever lighting, and the whole thing looking very much at home on the Opera House stage. This last programme closed with the big hit from 1999, Morris’ Sandpaper Ballet, reminding us of why we’d fallen so hard for the company last time.

After a break of only two weeks—which the industrious could partially fill by migrating to Edinburgh for New York City Ballet’s no-Balanchine programmes—the autumn season opened with Birmingham Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells. Still homeless thanks to the overrun of rebuilding at their home theatre, the company had fixed this date too late for much publicity, but even so their programme attracted much fuller houses than on recent visits, with their attractive triple bill being more or less sold out. They opened with a revival of their Swan Lake in the production made for them by Peter Wright and Galina Samsova in 1981. Director David Bintley doesn’t schedule the classics very often and was giving only a second outing to Swan Lake, which hasn’t been seen in London in this version for ten years. It’s a very handsome production, designed by Philip Prowse in a darkly dramatic style which echoes the sombre development of the plot. Wright begins the ballet with a very brief prologue, in which we glimpse the funeral procession of Siegfried’s father, and all the rest of the drama hinges on this. Siegfried’s mother (magnificently acted by former ballerina Marion Tait) doesn’t disapprove of him having a good time as such, she just doesn’t like to see him partying whilst the court is in mourning—and so on, through an unusually logical telling of the story.

Unfortunately the lack of the regular discipline of the classics did show in the company’s performance. There are some outstanding soloists, notably Chi Cao who combined elegance with dash as Benno, but others looked out of shape technically—hopefully the run of Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty promised for next year, will put this right. The principal roles were taken by Leticia Muller and Andrew Murphy. She’s an unusually dramatic and passionate Odette but without the definition and distinction in her dancing to make her interpretation satisfying. He has a very strong stage presence—Bintley sees him as a danseur noble—but played the whole evening on one note of withdrawn unhappiness. Again, more performances may help him to colour the role more interestingly.

BRB’s mixed programme opened with a new piece by Bintley, his first pure dance piece for some time. He joins the throng of those who have used Verdi’s attractive, danceable ballet music The Seasons, and uses it to show off some of his best dancers. Bintley always pays more attention to the corps de ballet than many choreographers, and has some interestingly unsymmetrical arrangements for them; he also achieves the near-impossible in a plotless ballet by hardly ever reminding us of something or other by Balanchine. The first half of the piece is the more successful, with the Spring pas de deux—which was written first, and given separately last season—a triumph for Chi Cao and for the company’s rising star Nao Sakuma. Cast changes enforced by various injuries may have made the later sections lose some of their planned effect.

The centrepiece of the evening was the first London showing of BRB’s revival of Ashton’s wartime ballet Dante Sonata, horribly timely two days after the Twin Towers tragedy. Even in normal circumstances, I’d found it painfully emotional when I first saw it: if it was less devastating this time than I’d feared, it was due to underplaying by the dancers rather than to the ballet itself. It needs a white-hot commitment to make its point to the full, and perhaps also the more intense focus of a smaller theatre.

I had planned to end with a review of the first London season for nine years of the Alvin Ailey, due to open at Sadler’s Wells the next week, but they were simply unable to rearrange their travel in time. A small casualty, perhaps, but sincerely felt all the same.