danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

London Report

by Jane Simpson
copyright © 2001 by Jane Simpson
Winter 2001

In the olden days there used to be quite a long gap in the London dance season at the end of summer – six or seven weeks when you could go away on holiday or whatever without missing anything. This year the break was down to a fortnight, with the Kirov hardly gone before Mukhamedov and his company moved into Sadler’s Wells. After that it was something of a bumpy ride—from Béjart to Cunningham, via Preljocaj, in successive weeks, one needed radical readjustments of viewpoint, involvement and tolerance level.

Mukhamedov’s programme made a disappointing start to the season: very similar to last year’s, it featured a ‘class’ section, several pas de deux ranging from goodish to disastrous, and a couple of new works designed to show off himself and Asylmuratova. Darshan Singh Buller’s Sita, based on the mythology of Indo-European farming culture, at least had the virtue of using Mukhamedov as he now is—massy, intense— rather than trying to keep alive his older image; but it did little for Asylmuratova other than show off the extreme flexibility of her body. A new piece by Gillian Lynne, to music by Gershwin, let the two stars strut their stuff in Armani costumes, and unfortunately also gave Mukhamedov lots of opportunities for his audience-mugging habit, now gone far beyond a joke and beginning to deprive him of the dignity of a great dancer.

Béjart’s Ballet Lausanne was last seen in London four years ago, a visit widely remembered for Mr C —many people’s choice as worst ballet of the decade. Béjart has a following here, one which fills theatres, but he’s never really convinced the regular dance audience, or most of the press, that he’s the great, innovative choreographer that much of mainland Europe thinks him. Apart from anything else, to sceptical English eyes the overt emotionalism of much of his work is deeply suspect: does he really expect us to take it all seriously? His season opened with a triple bill. Seven Greek Dances, once part of a longer piece called Thalassa: Mare Nostrum is a useful introduction to the company, showing off the men especially but also introducing the gifted Christine Blanc. The second item had another highly talented dancer, Gil Roman, going through a tortured emotional routine to Mahler’s Adagietto; and the programme ended with Bolero, which I skipped, having already seen it the once, which seems enough for any lifetime.

The rest of the season gave us Ballet for Life, an AIDS ballet in memory of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the band Queen, and Jorge Donn, longtime star of the Béjart company. You’d be hard put to it to guess that, though: only one of the many episodes into which the work is divided seems to make any explicit reference to AIDS, with the rest being more or less directly inspired by the raw sentimentality of the songs (by Queen) and the occasional bit of Mozart thrown in for relief. The curtain calls summed up the problem I find with Bejart: the lights go up to reveal him standing alone at the back of the stage; the dancers enter individually to be embraced or otherwise saluted by him; then, as the volume is turned up on a reprise of ‘The Show Must Go On’, they all walk very slowly downstage, staring out into the auditorium, and most of the audience spring to their feet, applauding wildly. A moving gesture, with Béjart anxious to take part in the tribute, or blatant audience manipulation? It depends on how cynical you’re feeling by now.

The French/Albanian choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has made many works for companies from the Paris Opera Ballet to NYCB, but has yet to be invited to the Royal Ballet: rumour says this may change under the next director. In the meantime he brought his own company, based in Aix-en-Provence, to Sadler’s Wells for a short season of his Romeo and Juliet. He quotes multiple sources for the idea of setting it in a modern totalitarian state, of which 1984 and recent situations in many East European countries are the most obvious. Juliet is a daughter of one of the ruling class, Romeo is a rebel living on the street, and much of the surface of the ballet is concerned with formalised images of oppression (and a real guard dog). As with every version of this story, though, the heart of the piece is in the interaction between the two lovers, and Preljocaj is one of the best there is at putting together sex and emotion in a non-glamourised but deeply moving form. Good though the love duets are, however, they are outclassed for emotional impact by the death-scene, so touching it’s almost impossible to watch.

It’s always too long since we last saw Paul Taylor: but this time it’s been seriously too long—about eleven years since his last London season. That was very poorly attended, and by all accounts a financial disaster. This short visit in November had something of the air of a toe in the water, to test if the London audience has yet come to its senses. It’s inexplicable to me why this wonderful company isn’t more popular here: the only rational explanation I can think of is that the ballet audience imagine they won’t like it because it’s too ‘modern’, and the contemporary dance audience think they won’t like it because it’s too ‘soft’. They’re both wrong, of course, and it was a pleasure to hear the happy but amazed comments of people venturing in from either wing for the first time. The only cause for regret was that the company brought only one programme —but that one comprised three pieces all new to London, and with more than enough interest to support repeated visits.

Ten years is the average length of stay for dancers in the company, so it’s not surprising, though sad, that Patrick Corbin is the only dancer remaining from the last visit. He had a leading role in each of the three dances, most strikingly in Sacre du Printemps, a piece which I found more and more pleasure in this time, having been slightly baffled when I first saw it years ago in Paris. Most prominent of the new dancers was Lisa Viola, whose solo in the lovely Cascade was probably the finest contribution of the season. The third piece, Piazzolla Caldera, seemed more subdued than I’d expected form the excerpts seen in the recent Paul Taylor film: maybe it’s the loss of Francie Huber’s incisive dancing and personality that has diluted the impact.

The theatre was respectably full and the press reviews were almost universally ecstatic: I hope this will have given them the encouragement for a return visit very soon.

A welcome feature of programming at the new Royal Opera House has been the increasing use made of the smaller performing spaces now available. The Clore Studio Upstairs is a ballet studio with moveable bench seating for about 200 along one side, and it’s being used for occasional performances as well as for more educational programmes. One of those to benefit has been the choreographer Matthew Hawkins. Now established as an interesting and original talent outside the mainstream, Hawkins danced in the Royal corps de ballet in the 1980s, when his bony features and uncompromising style always made him an awkward fit. As he says in a programme note, “Yes, I did work here but here was not here then!”, and he describes the work he made for this occasion, Angels and Exiles, as done in ‘a spirit of reunion’. Danced to a background of Cesar Franck’s Redemption, it includes dancers from his own modern company and from the Royal Ballet, as well as one from the Anjali Dance company, which exists to give performing experience to people with learning disabilities. Although the different styles aren’t fully integrated, he weaves them together very cleverly to make a work with a real sense of purpose—its meaning perhaps just out of reach, but genuinely there, to be grasped some other time. Decoratively it was unusual, to say the least: the only ‘set’ was a long serpent-like object twined round the barres at the side, and made, it turned out, of pointe shoes; and Hawkins himself, still a very striking dancer, was dressed in allover tights of devore velvet, with a lot more devore than velvet. The whole thing seemed precisely the sort of evening that starts to justify the amazing amount of money spent on the new theatre.

Every Royal Ballet programme this season carries a notice in large black letters telling us, in case we hadn’t noticed, that this is Anthony Dowell’s last season after ‘a long and distinguished career as dancer and director’. (I doubt this is his own idea, but can you imagine, in a million years, Ninette de Valois authorising such a thing when she retired?) He’s built his last year of programmes on ballets he danced in himself, and it is turning out to be much the most interesting for years: a reflection, perhaps, of the comparative quality of the choreographers of his era and today. His own production of Swan Lake, though, gets no more satisfactory with the years: it is overburdened with decoration and the attempt at a realistic style of acting in the first act seems more and more out of place at each revival.

The performance I saw had the new principal, Tamara Rojo, dancing her first Odette/Odile for the company: a very pleasing debut, but with some very strange things going on in the background. An ill-matched pas de trois, a Neapolitan Dance disintegrating into a whirl of flailing arms, and six princesses who had lost all dignity to the point where some of them looked quite demented—it seemed as if the entire company was rapidly going to pieces. Fortunately Rojo’s dancing was of a level to distract attention from all of this. She’s made a real hit with audiences and press alike, and although I personally haven’t yet been struck by the coup de foudre, I was very impressed by her. Technically she’s very strong, although she uses her arms in a unconventional way which is sometimes unattractive; and there is nothing tentative about her—she knows what effects she wants to make and goes straight for them. What I didn’t like was the way she has the start of the Act ll adagio played very slowly—not quite Makarova-slow, but getting on that way—and the way she held up the music for a balance in the Act lll pas de deux, without achieving the rock-steadiness which might partially justify such a whim. Her Siegfried was another recent recruit, Johan Persson, a strong partner and technically fine, but with some way to go to find a dramatically convincing interpretation.

The first triple bill of the season had a real novelty: a revival of Antony Tudor’s Shadowplay, originally made for Dowell himself at any early stage in his career, and not seen at Covent Garden since the early 1980s. Then, as now, many people found the ballet’s concept puzzling, and neither of the casts I saw had the charisma to convince. Two young dancers, Edward Watson and Ivan Putrov, had one performance each in Dowell’s role, and not surprisingly neither of them had anything like a fully worked-out characterisation. Merle Park’s original role as the Celestial was underdanced by both casts, and I was sorry to have missed what sounded like an outstanding interpretation from Rojo on the first night. The supporting dancers looked underprepared, and I think on this showing the ballet didn’t score any higher than ‘potentially interesting’. A shame, as we with longer memories know it can be more than that. This programme ended with another reprise of Marguerite and Armand, with Sylvie Guillem repeating last season’s success with either Nicholas Le Riche or Jonathan Cope (who finally, in one or two of his jumps, has managed to inject some degree of urgency into his portrayal). Sandwiched between these two was a new piece by Michael Corder – an opening ballet if ever there was one, it was completely swamped by the high drama on either side, not to mention two intervals each longer than the actual ballet. Corder’s fluent but bland choreography was danced fluently and blandly by Darcey Bussell on the first night: the ballet looked much sharper and more interesting when the second cast, Leanne Benjamin, took over. It will be very sad if Bussell never finds a choreographer who can find something beyond the sweet-natured, long-legged and technically amazing young woman we’ve known since her graduation performance thirteen years ago.

There was more Tudor in the next programme: his Lilac Garden, revered as one of the great ballets of our dance history, but very rarely seen here in recent years. Guillem again had a triumph as Caroline, but hardly anyone else in the two casts came near getting it right. Watching the second cast, I happened to be sitting next to someone who remembered the ballet from early performances at the tiny Mercury theatre, and was surprised to find that he wanted much more emotion from the dancers. He described, for instance, his memory of Celia Franca as the Episode in his Past as being ‘much feistier—she looked as is she could kill!’. I could think of two possible explanations, one being the obvious loss of immediacy in the much larger theatre, and the other being that the ballet’s reputation for repressed emotion has caused this aspect to become over-emphasised over the years, assisted by its migration to America and back. Before this we saw Ashton’s Symphonic Variations and the white Monotones trio, preceded by La Valse, which was the first ballet ever given under Dowell’s directorship. I hadn’t realised how long it is since Monotones was seen at Covent Garden. It’s been done on much smaller stages and although it looks good even then, it was very satisfying to see it again in its proper setting. Bussell again did the first cast, and got adulatory notices, but for me her presence had two real disadvantages: her size requires the two men to be cast from the ranks of the large and strong rather than the well-proportioned and classical; and a consequence of this is that it looks like a show piece for Bussell rather than a trio of equals. A later cast, with Zenaida Yanowsky, fixed the second of these but still had a less than ideal pair of men.

Symphonic Variations again had the hugely promising Alina Cojocaru in the lead. I suspect since her debut earlier in the year she’s learned more about the ballet’s history, and no longer dances it with such blithe ignorance of its difficulties; and this time she had competition from strong casting of the other two women—Sarah Wildor and Rojo, no less. For whatever reason, I thought Cojocaru looked slightly more tense, and a bit skittery—but that still leaves her looking better than some much more famous inhabitants of the role. This overlong programme ended with MacMillan’s Gloria, notable at one performance for the debut in the leading role of Edward Watson, who in a piece like this looks quite extraordinary—I don’t remember ever seeing a dancer whose arms and legs are both so loosely articulated and so emotionally articulate. He seems born to convey anguish—which gives him a great future in the Royal Ballet’s repertoire.

Lastly, before the Nutcrackers set in, came a revival of Ondine, with Rojo sharing the title role with Wildor and Miyako Yoshida. It was pleasing to find more or less full houses at every performance, and prolonged applause at the end regardless of who was dancing—maybe the ballet is at last beginning to establish itself. Both Wildor and Rojo gave fine interpretations, with Yoshida equally fine in the last act but rather two-dimensional early on. Unfortunately none of their partners came near matching them; the best male dancing by far came from Johan Kobborg in the divertissement, and from Ricardo Cervera, less technically assure but more stylish in the same role and genuinely exciting as Tirrenio, Lord of the Mediterranean.