danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

London Report

by Jane Simpson
copyright 1999 by Jane Simpson
Winter 1999

Let's start with something cheerful, and get to the Royal Ballet later.

The success story of the last few months has been the opening of the rebuilt Sadler's Wells Theatre, designed to operate primarily as a dance house for visiting companies. During a two-year closure it has been transformed, with money from the National Lottery, from its familiar but cramped and uncomfortable self into an unrecognisable new format, with a stage twice as big as it was and huge foyers and bars. Unfortunately it's still not quite finished, so there are electric cables lying around, no coffee yet available in the bars, and signage designed mainly to confuse first-timers, who have to learn that to reach their seats in the First Circle they need to follow the pointers labelled 'Men's WC'. The curtain had to be held for half an hour on the preview night, with the audience already seated and the dancers desperately trying to keep warmed up, whilst the Health and Safety people decided whether or not to allow them to open! However, with each visit one finds more bits completed, and the vibes for the future are good.

First into the new theatre was the Rambert Dance Company, currently the country's leading modern dance group, and unusual these days in playing a mixed repertoire rather than concentrating on the works of one choreographer. Their opening night included Paul Taylor's Airs, which two or three British companies have done over the years, and I was hoping they would actually start their programme with this lovely piece?the happiest possible opening for the new theatre. In fact they put it last on the bill, starting instead with two pieces by Jiri Kylian. Neither was really the crash-bang opening people were hoping for, but even those who despise Kylian's work agreed that the company looked wonderful on the new stage.

Rambert's director, Christopher Bruce, made a new piece for the occasion, Four Scenes, to music with a Scottish flavor by Dave Heath. It shows children at play over the course of a day, symbolizing the journey from birth to death. I found it diffused and rambling, so by the time we got to Airs I was more than ready for some genuinely celebratory choreography, and it was lovely to sense the audience relaxing into the delights of Taylor's masterpiece. The Rambert dancers haven't quite got it right at the moment?they're too self conscious, and perhaps a touch too staid?but a couple of them definitely have the makings, and it'll be interesting to see it again after a few more performances. Most conspicuous among the cast was Matthew Hart, ex-Royal Ballet and an aspiring choreographer, whose deeply inappropriate 'aren't I cute?' manner makes me want to kick him?a season dancing with his head in a paper bag would do him a world of good. Rambert's finest dancer, a complete contrast, is Paul Liburd, who I'd rate as one of the ten best dancers in the country in any discipline. The linear clarity of his dancing makes him a magnet to the eye in everything he does?if he'd chosen ballet rather than modern dance he'd be a household name by now.

Earlier in the summer London had a very welcome mini-invasion of American companies - the Tharp and Cunningham companies, which are reasonably frequent visitors, and a group of NYC dancers to provide some novelty. Merce Cunningham brought two programmes, and collected his usual set of adulatory notices; the only critic who gave him a really bad review resigned a fortnight later ?no connection, of course. I got the most pleasure from the Event in the first programme, rich in resonance, varied, and wonderfully danced. Much of it came from Winterbranch, but you didn't need to know that; I wonder if recognizing all the constituent parts adds to or detracts from the pleasure of these pieces? In contrast, I found the opening piece, Windows, very hard work. Try though I may, I can't find a 'right-brain' way of watching the Cunningham of the last few years: instead I spend the time furiously thinking, wondering what's driving the choreography, which bits he got from his computer program, and so on, and although this is undoubtedly stimulating in an intellectual way, it's not what I personally want from dance. I know that there is a way of seeing the sensual pleasure of what he's doing, because I hear people around me sighing with the bliss of it, but to me it seems arid compared with his earlier work.

It's been a real surprise to me to discover how low is Twyla Tharp's reputation among newer dance-goers. It's not that long since she was last here with her own company, but it was a season arranged at very short notice when one of her touring dates fell through, and she used a theatre off the beaten track for the mainstream dance audience, so a lot of people missed it. Since then she's done Mr Worldy Wise, and revived Push Comes to Shove for the Royal Ballet, neither of which has been a great popular success; and as a result I've heard the announcement of In the Upper Room, to be added to the Birmingham RB's repertoire in the spring, greeted with "Oh no, not another Tharp!" I'm afraid this programme, the "Tharp!" she's been touring for the last year or so, won't have done much to improve matters.

Sweet Fields, her 'Shaker' piece, seemed the most like the Tharp we used to know, and was probably best liked by audiences; it was interesting to compare it with the middle act of Mr Worldy Wise, which is more or less a standalone plotless ballet, also with strong Shaker influences. Least popular with the critics, and definitely with me, was the Cuban/Latin Yemayá. I couldn't believe that the once-innovative Tharp could be revisiting such extremely well-trodden ground, and to such little effect. The company was also something of a disappointment. When she was here four years ago, she brought a strong but relatively new set of dancers who looked fine until Jamie Bishton appeared and showed us how it was really meant to look. By now he's long gone, together with all the rest of that company, and no more than a couple of the new set seemed particularly Tharpian. The real problem for me was her reliance on the English dancer Andrew Robinson, so heavily featured as to be the de facto star of the group. Robinson danced with London Contemporary Dance Theatre in the late eighties, and had even then a problem projecting much personality, though he's undeniably a fine technical dancer. Since then nothing seems to have changed, except that he's now acting a personality?as well as acting charming, or cute, neither of which suits him at all. He got amazingly good notices but I found him impossible to like.

The New York group was originally announced as 'Stars of NYCB', but when Darcy Kistler was injured and replaced by ABT's Amanda McKerrow, it was changed to 'New York Ballet Stars', subtitled 'American ballet with grace, beauty and attack'. It's a very long time since we saw NYCB in London, and the current generation of principals is almost unknown here, so the theatre was packed and there was a lot of anticipatory excitement. Peter Boal and Wendy Whelan were the most familiar names, and the programme opened with Boal in Apollo. It was not particularly well staged and had the curious accompaniment of an off-stage orchestra, so the dancing had a lot to make up for. Apollo is quite well known in London, and I was astounded at how different this version looked. Over here it's an article of faith that the pure Balanchine style lives only at NYCB, and we've been told a thousand times that no-one else can do it properly, least of all us with our more dramatic and interpretative tradition. Yet here were dancers from the fountainhead of Just Do, and what were they Just Doing? Acting, that's what. A performance like this from the Royal Ballet would have brought down coals of fire on their head from the purists among the critics. This is not meant as criticism, I enjoyed it. Well, some of it: Boal was excellent and McKerrow very good. But I just couldn't believe that we were seeing what came very close to a demi-caractère interpretation from the home of spartan neoclassicism.

The rest of the programme had a new piece by ex-Royal Ballet Christopher Wheeldon, designed presumably, and I think unnecessarily, to bring in his home audience. It was for the more junior members of the group and joined the other Wheeldon pieces I've seen in the repository for wispy, quite pretty but utterly unmemorable ballets. Balanchine's Tchaikowsky pas de deux was a mistake. We've seen some very starry performances of this in the past, and even allowing for the small stage and the worst-recorded music I've ever heard, Kelly Cass and Benjamin Millepied didn't come within miles of matching them. Red Angels went down very well, but was overshadowed by the undoubted success of the evening, Christopher d'Amboise's Circle of Fifths. I don't recall having seen anything by him before--we are almost totally ignorant of American post-Balanchine classical choreography--and it was a very pleasant surprise. I found it completely engrossing and impressively well danced. Whelan, Boal and Albert Evans danced the first night, with Wheeldon taking over from Boal for the rest of the week. She was much admired, but for me the real star was Peter Boal, of whom we need to see much more, the sooner the better.

All this, though, has seemed like diversions to take our mind off the fate hanging over the Royal Ballet. A brief recapitulation of the story so far: the Royal Ballet is temporarily homeless whilst the Royal Opera House is being rebuilt, with more money from the National Lottery. Poor management, both financial and strategic, has brought the ROH to the verge of bankruptcy, and amongst the suggested solutions is one to save money by closing down all the performing companies--ballet, opera and orchestra--until the new theatre is ready in a year's time. Under cover of this threat, the ROH is trying to impose new terms on all its employees, including longer working hours, less than 52 weeks of guaranteed pay (for the first time in the RB's history), and lower salaries. Deadlines for acceptance of these conditions come and go; as I write, the next one is two days away, despite the fact that Michael Kaiser, the new manager poached from ABT, only started work this week and can't possibly have had time to get involved in negotiations. Meanwhile, rumours circulate about dancers leaving to join Tetsuya Kumakawa in the new company he is said to be forming--most of the principal men if you believe everything you hear--and others have seized the opportunity to take leave of absence or to start families: six soloists are new or imminently expectant mothers.

Whilst all this has been going the company has given three London seasons: a brief appearance to celebrate Ninette de Valois' 100th birthday, at the Barbican Theatre (usually home to the Royal Shakespeare Company but branching out into dance this summer), a few weeks of blockbusters at the Coliseum, and a recent three weeks of more varied bills at the new Sadler's Wells. Understandably demoralised, the company is not looking at its best.

The Sadler's Wells season mercifully contained only one full-evening piece, the Tharp Mr Worldy Wise, which needed extensive recasting to cover for Kumakawa's departure and the need for a second cast to manage the twice-in-a-day schedule. William Trevitt had the unenviable job of following Mukhamedov in the title role and the young Shi-Ning Liu took over from Kumakawa. Reviews were cool and the house was far from full. More successful were MacMillan's Lorca based Las Hermanas, a tightly written and claustropohobic drama, well danced and enthusiastically received, and Nureyev's staging of Act lll of Raymonda, which gave us a brief glimpse of Zelensky and our first look at the new recruit, Carlos Acosta. It's too soon to say how he's going to fit into the company and the repertoire, but early omens are good. Another (yet another) new Ashley Page reran the familiar story: interesting decor, excellent dancing, intriguing concept - and flat, disappointing choreography. Insider whispers said that it wasn't properly finished and suggested we look at it as a work in progress, but I find that unacceptable. There was nothing generally announced, and it's cheating the audience to give them something that's not yet ready for public viewing.

Most keenly anticipated was an Ashton triple bill, not a common sight these days. with Les Patineurs and Birthday Offering carried over from last season and a long overdue revival of Enigma Variations. As so often recently, our hopes were only very partially fulfilled.

Patineurs ought to be an almost sure-fire success: it has that wonderful quality of inevitability about the choreography, and besides that, it's fun: all it needs is three technically strong dancers with some idea of characterisation, and a nice couple for the romantic pas de deux. Unfortunately on the opening night only Miyako Yoshida, as the fouetté-spinning Blue Girl, got it just right--she was having a wonderful season. The Blue Boy was Justin Meissner, deputizing for the departed Kumakawa. He's done the role before but still looked almost crippled by nerves--together with his always rather stiff shoulders and neck, this seemed to lock him up and deprive him of any fluency. However he was already better by the next night and reports said that by the end of the week he was really quite impressive. The White couple were Gary Avis and Gillian Revie, she in particular looking completely miscast and unhappy. She's a fine MacMillan dancer and had been one of the most impressive in in the middle, but this whole evening demonstrated that she's by no stretch of the imagination an Ashton dancer. The most charitable explanation was that she's next in line to one of the absent mothers-to-be and had just inherited all her roles regardless of suitability. A second cast the next night showed Belinda Hatley at the top of her form as a Blue Girl?she and Yoshida would make a terrific pair.

We saw Birthday Offering in the Barbican season earlier in the summer, and I reserved judgment as it was shown on a cramped stage where it couldn't possibly look at its best. Here, on the much larger new stage, I'd hoped for better things--but, as perhaps you've guessed by now, no such luck. For one thing the company seems to have abandoned for good the original setting: it wasn't much, just a flight of steps across the back and some standing chandeliers, but now it's all done on a flat stage and the chandeliers hang from above--why change something so simple? The women's costumes have come in for a huge amount of derision-- they're knee length, bell shaped tutus with rather stiff looking bodices, all in different colors, and I personally rather like them: their slightly Edwardian air is a key ingredient of the ballet. Many people would like to see the piece recostumed in the usual flat tutus, but I think they'd be quite wrong: the choreography was designed for these dresses, they affect the way the dancers walk and move, and if high arabesques and extensions make them look bunchy and ugly, it's the fault of the dancers' misunderstanding of the style rather than of the costumes.

Birthday Offering needs seven outstanding female soloists, and the present casts don't come anywhere near providing them. If you put the best of the various casts together you might perhaps get five satisfactory, though not brilliant performances. Best were the young Mara Galeazzi, Hatley and Yoshida (again), with Sarah Wildor outscoring Darcey Bussell in the leading ballerina's role. The leading man for both was the young Argentinian Inaki Urlezaga--he's rather sweet, like an enthusiastic puppy, and very earnest and proud in his presentation of his partner. I've heard various excuses for what can only be described as the company's failure in this ballet. Most common seems to be the feeling that the seven solos were written so particularly for their original inhabitants that it's not fair to expect anyone else to be able to do them. I'd accept that if it was presented as 'no-one else will be able to dance them to such perfection'; but I don't think it's unreasonable to accept that the current generation ought at least to be able to do the steps and find some viable interpretation. Deborah Bull, in her recent book, complains about being cast in Nerina's solo, full of jumps, which she finds too difficult, and it seems fair enough that an individual dancer should find herself more happy in some of the solos than in others; but that the company evidently can't find anyone at all who can get through some of them is a serious indictment.

Many of the new audience had never seen Enigma before, and most of the ones I spoke to were disappointed in it. 'Very pretty, but...' was a typical comment. It's hard to blame the dancers: almost none of them can have seen the ballet themselves, and are presumably only doing what they're told, and it's especially hard to cast a piece with so many parts for mature adults from such a predominantly young company. But even so, and making every possible allowance for absence, injury, stress, and an unfamiliar stage, somehow all the flavor has been lost. Only when Bruce Sansom and Sarah Wildor did the solos created by Dowell and Sibley, and when Genesia Rosato took over Lady Elgar in the second cast, did the ballet truly come to life, and some of the other characterizations almost had me in tears of despair. It's a ballet specifically about friendship, but that doesn't seem enough for this MacMillan-raised generation, and suddenly it's made to seem a ballet about suppressed lust instead. Watching the second cast Jaeger in the formerly sublime Nimrod variation, a newcomer could easily have gone away with the impression that he was in love with Elgar and that Lady Elgar was intervening to warn him off.

And on a different level of complaint, didn't the Telegraph Boy used to get a step to do? I remember him biting the sixpence he was given and then doing a nice open jump before running off; here he just walked on, delivered the telegram, walked off. God is in the details.

There was special poignancy in these 'Enigmas' for those who remembered Svetlana Beriosova, unforgettably beautiful creator of the Lady, and who knew she was lying close to death. How grateful we should be that in Ashton's choreography for the 23-year-old with the world before her in Birthday Offering and for the mature, warm and deeply human woman in Enigma, we shall always be able to envisage one of ballet's loveliest stars.