danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

London Report

English National Ballet, Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet (and recent new ballets of David Bintley), Pina Bausch

by Jane Simpson
copyright © 1999 by Jane Simpson
Spring 1999

Who, would you guess, is the most-performed choreographer in Britain these days? Not Petipa, not MacMillan, not even Matthew Bourne—it’s actually Derek Deane, whose English National Ballet spends a good part of each season dancing his versions of Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, and Swan Lake. His choreography is decent enough but, seen in bulk, very bland; like so many others he compensates with Production Ideas. His Nutcracker, which opened the Christmas season in London, has a modern dress first act, designed to please would-be-cool ten-year-olds, too old for magic but still young enough to think mobile phones on stage sophisticated.

Nutcrackers

Deane himself danced Drosselmeyer on the first night of the season, and caused a lot of comment by the unmistakably sexual overtones of his attitude to Clara—more than he meant, perhaps, as he reportedly toned down his interpretation considerably at later performances. Much the best of the first night cast was the Nutcracker Prince of the ever elegant and stylish Thomas Edur, dancing with his wife Agnes Oaks as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Edur is one of the better kept secrets of the ballet world. He and Oaks are from Estonia, and first attracted attention at the Jackson competition in 1990, where they won the Best Senior Couple prize as well as announcing their engagement. Since then we’ve seen them mostly with ENB, though they did have a year—reportedly a not very happy one—with BRB. Edur is a danseur noble, a dying breed, and the shock of pleasure when he appears tells us a lot about the standard of dancing we’re used to today. He and Oaks prefer to dance together, and they have certainly honed the mechanics of their partnership close to perfection; but one can’t avoid noticing that she is an efficient and able dancer whilst he is something considerably more.

Playing against ENB were Birmingham Royal Ballet, who brought their traditional, and justly celebrated, Peter Wright production to the Lyceum, a handsome old theater just down the street from the Royal Opera House, recently refurbished and reopened after years of neglect. This is quite possibly the best Nutcracker ever seen in this country, and had several excellent performances by young casts, some, like Chi Cao, Nao Sakuma and Lei Zhao, with enormous promise. Bintley’s company is small enough for him to give talent its head wherever in the hierarchy it appears, and Sakuma in particular, a recent Jackson prize winner but still a very junior member of the corps de ballet, took to the stage like a ballerina. One of the great pleasures of long-term ballet going is that thrill of astonishment when an unknown dancer suddenly steps out of the crowd and stakes her claim to a place in the limelight, and BRB is one of the companies where this pleasure is most often to be found. This made the season quite addictive, and I kept finding myself sneaking back for another look... just one more matinée... I can quit whenever I want.

Cinderellas

The other Christmas special, Cinderella, came in two flavours. The Royal Ballet gave us Ashton’s 50 year old classic, complete with Ugly Sisters danced by men—not very well these days—lots of traditional transformations, and some gorgeous choreography. I saw Sarah Wildor’s debut in the title role, full of individual touches and her own beautifully musical dancing, and handsomely partnered by Michael Nunn, in one of his last roles before leaving the company to join Tetsuya Kumakawa. ENB, meanwhile, has Michael Corder’s version of the fairytale: created for them in 1996, it is now also in the repertoire of the Boston Ballet, who sent Patrick Armand and Larissa Ponomarenko to dance the first night. Corder’s choreography is fluent and shows the company off well, and he goes to great lengths to make his ballet different from Ashton’s, which he knew well in his dancing days with the Royal Ballet. Unfortunately, for my taste, he’s gone too far and thrown out too much along with the broad comedy—there is not enough incident for a whole evening, and not enough contrast in the dances to hold the attention and stop us thinking of what would be happening in the Ashton.

La Fille mal Gardée

The greatest Christmas joy was the Royal Ballet’s overdue revival of La Fille mal Gardée. David Vaughan writes about it elsewhere in this issue: I would second everything he says about the first cast, only adding that the performance I saw was possibly even better. What joy it gives to see this lovely ballet lit by central performances of such rightness, and with the company looking again like a cohesive whole. Other casts raised a few problems, particularly in the character roles, which included a couple of real disasters. Carlos Acosta had his first full-length role with the company as the dashing hero Colas, and gained superb reviews—he’s a real acquisition, though in this particular context I found his body language so strongly transatlantic that I had to invent a little extension to the plot to account for his presence in rural Suffolk. More difficult, for me, was Mukhamedov in the same role: the dancing pushed him to, and sometimes beyond, the limit of what he can now do, and he seemed to be making up for this by overacting, indeed playing to the audience—sad to see from one who would once have scorned such an approach. Some critics preferred both him and Acosta to Bruce Sansom, on the grounds that Colas should be a brash, bold young man with a Russian strength and abandon in his dancing, Sansom being too “neat and sweet” for their taste. I think they’re wrong: in a great classic like this there’s room for more than one interpretation, and Sansom’s “English” line looks so perfectly at home in the choreography that it brings tears to my eyes to watch him.

The rest of the season saw a succession of interesting companies at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, whose reopening has transformed the London dance scene. From last year, one of the leanest in living memory, we have moved to a year of plenty, with both national and visiting companies filling the schedule with hardly a gap. The theatre still isn’t finished, though, and has been badly hit by the Royal Opera’s decision to cut its 1999 programme to almost nothing, leaving Sadler’s Wells with months to fill at short notice. They did get some compensation for the broken contract, but even so, and despite very respectable houses for almost all the companies we’ve seen, they are already struggling for cash and have only been saved by a government handout of around $8 million. Does this mean a medium sized dance house, bringing interesting programming at reasonable prices, simply isn’t viable here? An illustration of the knife edge on which the theatre lives was provided by the hugely successful Pina Bausch season—or rather the Pina Bausch four days: the company was heavily sponsored, but the accounting was so tight that although there were huge queues for returns every night, and the theater could undoubtedly have sold out several more performances, they would have lost substantial amounts of money on each one. It’s a problem that has to be solved: the return of the Royal Ballet to its home at the end of this year will come nowhere near filling the gap that the loss of Sadler’s Wells would leave.

Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch was the hottest ticket of the season, by a long way, and as everywhere, her audience included many from the world of theater rather than dance. I can’t think of anyone else who arouses such different, and often totally opposed responses, least happy being the people who ignore the “theatre” in the company’s title and go expecting an all-dance show. The piece she brought for her first visit to London in seventeen years was Viktor, a work from the eighties, inspired by Rome. The setting—typical Bausch-consists of a huge earth—work enclosing and dominating the dancing area; from the top, a man spends the whole evening shoveling soil down onto to the stage, and it’s the threatening, unsettling sound of this trickling earth that defines the piece for me. But the whole piece is Rorschach ink-blot test in motion: it’s a measure of Bausch’s strength that every episode has a dozen equally justifiable and equally powerful interpretations. The most famous part of the action, for instance, has the women swinging out over the audience clutching trapeze rings, to the sound of Fred Astaire: a scene that apparently has some in tears of joy at such carefree happiness, but which seemed to me very grim indeed-each woman being put through some social ordeal by smiling men: she swings up there with a fixed smile, and when she’s finally allowed back on the ground, she walks, slowly and still smiling into the wings, where I imagine her collapsing in a silent scream.

Bintley’s Edward II

Next into Sadler’s Wells came Birmingham Royal Ballet, opening this time with director David Bintley’s Edward II. Originally created for the Stuttgart company, this is a two act piece based on the play by Christopher Marlowe, telling the story of the 14th century king of England whose passion for his friend Piers Gaveston led to civil war and the downfall and death of the king—and most of the other characters too. It has been on view in Birmingham and on tour for a couple of seasons now; its reputation as a bold and exciting work had preceded it, and it was heralded by a lot of publicity and greeted with enthusiasm.

I found it disappointing and mystifying. The drama centers on the love affair between Edward and Gaveston, and it is certainly in the scenes between these two that the ballet has its best moments: but to me it seems as if Bintley, supposedly breaking new ground in the depiction of homosexual love, in fact backs off from a true confrontation. Most of the rest of the characters don’t come clearly to life—best was the Grim Reaper of David Justin—and though the lighting and sets combine to make some very dramatic action scenes, for me it was all curiously unmoving. That was till the last ten minutes, a graphically detailed scene of Edward’s humiliation and death, which made me extremely uncomfortable—not for the horror of what we were seeing, but in wondering why we were seeing it, and why Bintley felt he needed to dwell for so long on what could have been conveyed with equal power in a fraction of the time.

The triple bill which followed made a much better evening. The Protecting Veil is Bintley in a very different mood and mode. He describes the ballet as an “icon,” based on the life of the Virgin Mary. The score is a piece for cello and orchestra by John Tavener—one of the success stories of classical music in the last ten years, it is phenomenally popular with both New Age and Catholic adherents. Many dance critics, though, derided it for its lack of incident and general ‘undanceability’, which certainly make the choreographer’s task a hard one—probably one of the things that made it appeal to Bintley, never one to take the easy option. The first time I saw it, at the end of a long program, it did indeed feel like a substantial slice of eternity; but this time I found it far more approachable and couldn’t believe how soon the curtain came down. Five female dancers in turn illustrate different phases of the Virgin’s life, with five men who at times can be seen as Archangel, Joseph and Christ, but there is little explicit storytelling: it is the encircling atmosphere of the work that makes its effect, even for a non-believer like me. I am in a very small minority but to my eyes this is a bolder and better ballet than Edward II.

This program opened with the loving reconstruction of Ninette de Valois’ The Prospect Before Us, made to mark her 100th birthday last summer-an almost total success, it suits this primarily demi-caractère company perfectly. In the Upper Room is BRB’s first excursion into Tharp country and it is more successful than either of the Royal Ballet’s recent forays. It’s always an exciting piece to watch, and looks very fine on the big new Sadler’s Wells stage. The question, of course, is how well the dancers can adapt to the unfamiliar style, and not surprisingly not everyone had got it right on the first night. Best, for me, was Sergiu Poboreznic, who cast aside his usual somewhat inhibited manner and really let rip. Sakuma impressed again as the leading ‘pointe shoes’ woman—she had taken over at short notice from injured principal Monica Zamora and looked more poised and confident than we had any right to expect. Some of the rest of the cast need to loosen up a bit—quite a lot, in fact, in some cases; it will be interesting to see the piece again when they’ve danced it a few more times.

Pacific Northwest Ballet

Next came the first London visit of Pacific NorthWest Ballet, who unfortunately conformed to the almost unvarying custom of visiting companies in opening with the wrong program. The company had a great success in Edinburgh last summer with Balanchine’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, never seen in London and eagerly looked forward to, and could have earned good reviews and a lot of new friends if they’d started the week with that. Instead, for reasons one can well understand and sympathize with, they gave a quadruple bill on the first night, with pieces by director Kent Stowell and by Kevin O’Day and Donald Byrd, none of them known at all well in this country.

Almost no-one liked the Byrd, an obviously exhausting but unrewarding piece for four; the other two found a few admirers but were too bland and undifferentiated for most of the audience. Fortunately this bill ended with Balanchine—The Four Temperaments, rarely seen here in recent years, and adored by everyone.

The Midsummer, when they finally got to it, was a huge success. It is so different from Ashton’s familiar and much-loved version that there was no real need to compare the two, though some insisted on it; and it was so well danced that even those declaring a preference for Ashton’s could watch it several times over with pleasure. The BBC were filming it so the cast was the same except for one matinée: Patricia Barker repeated her success from Edinburgh, and Louise Nadeau and Olivier Wevers were excellent in the wonderful Act II pas de deux. I was thrilled, too, by Ariana Lallone as Hippolyta-is there a sight on the ballet stage more exciting than a big, bold Balanchine dancer in full cry? The other great pleasure was the dancing of the corps de ballet in Act II—so well-schooled and uniform, yet with an individual pride that was a delight to see.

Finally we had Arc Dance Company, founded and run by Danish choreographer Kim Brandstrup, in what looked on paper a surefire success: a piece about Don Juan and starring Irek Mukhamedov, a combination you’d have thought couldn’t fail. Alas, on the night it all came to much less than the sum of its parts. A comedy, based on the play The Return of Don Juan by Oluf Bang, the plot has Don Juan sent back to earth by the Devil to seduce a Pure Soul; she rejects him and he falls in love with her, passes up the chance to rape her, and has to rely on his servant Leporello to persuade the Devil that all has gone to plan. Unfortunately Brandstrup’s idea of a Pure Soul is a girl of such overwhelming insipidity that one can’t imagine Don Juan looking at her even once, let alone falling in love, and Leporello’s own love affair is much more sharply delineated—and much funnier. Mukhamedov never gets the chance to show any of the dangerous side of the character—tantalizingly hinted at on the publicity poster—and although he fools around charmingly he can’t save the piece from failure. What a waste!