danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

London Report

Houston Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, the Royal Ballet

by Jane Simpson
copyright © 2001 by Jane Simpson
Summer 2001

After a rather quiet winter, the London dance scene speeded up until by the middle of June there were four major companies playing simultaneously. Romeo and Juliet in the round, or the Rambert Dance Company celebrating it’s 75th birthday? The Kirov’s Sleeping Beauty, or Mats Ek’s Swan Lake? You could take your choice; few people had the stamina, or the money, to see everything. There were empty seats at some performances, even at the Kirov, but high prices may have had as much to do with this as the quantity of what was on offer.

First of the visiting companies this spring was the Houston Ballet, at Sadler’s Wells for a week with Ben Stevenson’s Cleopatra and a triple bill. Cleopatra, I’m afraid, proved something of a problem for London audiences.

The old-style Bolshoi in full cry might have got away with it, but in a less uninhibited performance it was almost impossible to take seriously. Echoes of many ancient British comedy films didn’t help, and despite the exotic splendours of the scenery it came across as old-fashioned melodrama, without the saving grace of appropriate or even interesting choreography. (Did Fokine live in vain?) Lauren Anderson, in the title role, earned a good deal of respect and admiration for her dignity and stage presence, but that was about it. It was a shame, as there was a lot of good will for the company—after Pacific Northwest Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, visits from American groups are much looked forward to.

The triple bill which followed showed off works from the last five or six years of the company’s repertoire, plus the Diana and Acteon pas de deux—the last, one assumes, to get Houston star and London favourite Carlos Acosta on stage. Of the three ballets, Trey McIntyre’s Second before the Ground was the most successful, especially in its very striking opening. Australian Natalie Weir set herself an impossible challenge: her In a Whisper was set to the sublime slow movement of Schubert’s String Quintet—holy ground for me and many others. Whilst I don’t believe any music should be completely off-limits for a choreographer, choosing something like this, which has huge emotional resonances for many people, is bound to leave a proportion of the audience looking unbeliev-ingly at stage action which seems utterly irrelevant, and indeed trivial. I did, though, see enough of interest in the actual steps to make me want to see something else of Weir’s—but please, to music that’s more within her reach. Stanton Welch’s Bruiser, which closed this programme, is slick entertainment but without the content to sustain its length.

The refurbishment of the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s home theatre is running way over schedule, so that the second part of David Bintley’s Arthur—planned for the reopening—instead had its première at Sadler’s Wells. Part 2 continues both the successes and the problems of the first half. Spectacular scenic effects and an effective if rather unobtrusive score are by the same team (Davison/Conran and John McCabe respec-tively), and many of the characters, of course, reappear. What’s gone missing is the parallel with modern warfare which was, not over-subtly, woven into part 1—not a great loss, as it turns out. Once again Bintley has let the complexity of the Arthur legend, and his passionate enthusiasm for it, run away with him, so that the details obscure the main lines of the tragedy. Time and again the action gets completely hung up on the lives and deaths (deaths, mostly) of minor characters about whom we care nothing.

Arthur himself is no longer the dashing young hero, but a man worn down by the reality of responsibility. It’s difficult to make this interesting in choreo-graphic terms, so the focus of interest is shifted to Mordred, Arthur’s son by his half-sister Morgan le Fay, danced on the first night by Bintley’s young star Robert Parker, who was Arthur in Part 1. He’s a bit too attractive and wholesome for a villain until the very last scenes, where the whole ballet finally comes to life—too late, unfortunately. His mother, Morgan, gets the best scenes and Leticia Muller makes her wickedly seductive without falling into melodrama. Poor Lancelot and Guinevere—two of the greatest romantic figures in our literature—never get the passionate, uninhibited pas de deux we’re all longing for: the lack of conviction in their love affair is one of the major shortcomings of the ballet. The other serious defect is that we never see Lancelot, or the equally important Gawain, as heroic figures in their own right. If we’re not shown what made Camelot and Arthur’s knights great, we can’t agonise over their downfall. So it’s not a success, I’m afraid; but there’s enough that’s worthwhile in the two parts put together to be worth rescuing, if time and money allow.

Next came the Bolshoi, which Marc Haegeman covers at greater length elesewhere in this issue. Despite the pleasure to be had from some fine dancing, the number of empty seats throughout the season must have told the promoters they’d mistaken the demand for programmes consisting mostly of pas de deux. I found that the demi-caractère pieces worked better than the more strictly classical extracts, making their own atmosphere more easily on the bare stage. How confusing it must be, though, for newcomers to ballet to see this random succession of pieces, following each other with no links of any sort, and with little help from programme notes apparently written for experts. I look forward to the day when back-of-the-seat screens, as used for surtitles at the opera, will provide some brief but useful introduction to each item in programmes like this.

The Dutch National Ballet have not been seen in London for years. For their return to Sadler’s Wells they chose mostly works by Hans van Manen, with the happy addition of Balanchine’s Four Temperaments to open the bill I saw. Van Manen’s Twilight is familiar here from its years in the repertoire of the touring Royal Ballet. It looks less angry and aggressive than it did then, but it still holds the interest, with the woman stalking the perimeter of the stage in her stiletto heels and its urban backcloth. The outstanding success of the week was van Manen’s Live, one of those rare works that seems to please everyone. Made in 1979, it uses a video camera to track two dancers, whose images are projected on a screen as they dance first of all in full view, and then leave the stage for a long duet in the theatre foyer, before the woman goes out into the street and is last seen walking off into the distance past the cars we parked there earlier. It may no longer seem a particularly original idea, but there’s something extraordinarily touching about watching the drama unfolding in the familiar space we’ve so recently left, and which belongs to us, the audience, rather than to the dancers.

Meanwhile the Royal Ballet put out the last programmes of its season proper—they are to return for a short time in the summer, but under the auspices of the Hochhauser management. There was plenty of excitement, even in the absence of both Guillem and Bussell. Giselle provided a lot of interest, with fine performances from some of the company’s established stars and from newcomers Tamara Rojo and Alina Cojocaru. Both of these two had the advantage of dancing with Johan Kobborg, a fine and sympa-thetic partner as well as a convincing Albrecht on his own account. He is becoming very popular with London audiences (and critics too), not least for his willingness to dance in the general repertory—even in supporting roles—as well as in the more glamorous full-length ballets.

It’s becoming almost superfluous to say that Rojo had a great success: so far her Royal Ballet performances haven’t revealed anything that she can’t do. She added some touches of her own to the first act—for instance, her Giselle is so upset by the initial confrontation between Albrecht and Hilarion that her heart starts pounding and she has to sit down to recover, a neat warning of what will happen to her later. Her second act was very beautiful, but danced almost in a trance: a lyric poem rather than a continuation of the drama. Sarah Wildor does exactly the opposite—I’ve never seen a second act Giselle so deeply and lovingly concerned for Albrecht’s survival.I know some people find this inappropriately ‘human’, but I liked it very much—after all Giselle is still a very new Wili and I don’t see why she should have forgotten the warmth of her love so soon. The Albrecht on whom she lavished so much care was Acosta, providing the astonishing dancing we’ve come to expect from him. It’s not a partnership made in heaven, though, and both he and Wildor would probably look better with someone else. The Myrtha in this cast was Zenaida Yanowsky, much the most satisfactory of the three I saw. It’s not so much the quality of her dancing that made this an outstand-ing performance, but the way she acts the role: she gives more meaning to her first entrances than anyone I’ve seen at Covent Garden in years.

Cojocaru’s debut in the title role was greeted with paeans of praise, heralding her here and now as a new great dancer. I found this a rather exagerrated reaction, and perhaps not terribly helpful to her. She’s only nineteen, and she has the intelligence to know for herself that she has a long way to go. For all that, though, her performance was lovely, with all the grace of unknow-ing youth. After her second outing in the role, Anthony Dowell announced her immediate promotion to Principal Dancer. There were plenty of raised eye-brows, and comments about her lack of experience and the merits of other dancers waiting for promotion, but she has such obvious star quality that I think he was probably right.

In an uneven Stravinsky programme, Leanne Benjamin repeated her last season’s success in the title role of Firebird. I heard good reports of Galeazzi in the same role and of Alastair Marriott as the evil Kostchei at later performances; but the surrounding cast didn’t seem convinced of what they were doing and the final scene still doesn’t have the magical power it once held. The only total success of the evening was Les Noces, which the Royal Ballet has always done well, and which does still exert its spell: the ending, as the bells chime and the leader of the village men slowly raises his arm, is one of the most powerfully moving moments in all ballet. I’m not sure it’s a good idea, though, to do it on the same programme as Firebird—it’s interesting to compare what the choreographers do with some of the same material, but to some extent the two pieces cancel each other’s effect.

Les Noces may be one of their showpieces, but the company has never really come to terms with Agon, which formed the centrepiece of this bill. Only Kobborg, in the cast I saw, had the right mixture of relaxation and edginess. Carlos Acosta danced the pas de deux with Yanowsky—he made surprisingly little impression and she was too soft, too afraid to assert her right to the role. Jaimie Tapper had the technique but not quite the manner for the second pas de trois.

Finally, a double bill of Ashton’s The Dream and Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth—both, like most of the rest of this season’s repertory, closely associated with Anthony Dowell in his dancing days. He created the role of Oberon when he was just twenty-one, and the choreography is built on his speed, his ability to change direction faster than you can blink, and the withdrawn elegance he had even when young. How his successors must curse him! It would be nice to be able to report that he was leaving the role, and the ballet, in good hands, but the performance I saw was not a happy one. It was Cojocaru’s debut as Titania, and she has obviously been very carefully coached, possibly even by Sibley—what she hasn’t yet found is a way into the character, to make the steps an expression of a living personality. Her four fairy attendants were a good team, with Galeazzi and the speedy Jenny Tattersall especially fine, but the rest of the ballet was in very poor shape: the rustics looked out of control, the Puck hit a new low of cuteness, and the lovers simply weren’t funny. I can only hope that performances later in the summer, with different casts, will show that this was just an off-night rather than the way the ballet is now supposed to look.

Song of the Earth has become a rarity at Covent Garden and this was a very welcome revival. I remember some very down-at-heel, scrappy performances in the past, but this one looked well rehearsed and mostly well danced, and it was better sung than it sometimes has been, as well. Rojo (again) and Kobborg (again) were fine as the leading woman and the Messenger of Death, though for me Rojo didn’t match the tragic high seriousness of Monica Mason (it was perhaps Mason’s best ever role). The musical and constantly improving Ricardo Cervera stood out amongst the supporting men. I hope that now this very moving ballet has been restored to the repertory, we’ll see it again soon.

As I write, the Kirov season still has a week to go. Jewels and the new Sleeping Beauty have been as enthusiastically received as last year and Swan Lake sold the house out, but their version of Manon was not generally appreciated. Still to come is a triple bill of Balanchine—Serenade, Apollo, and Symphony in C, of which more in our next issue.