59
Ballet
From the Desk of Genevieve
Bresson, Jean-Etienne Flamand, Luba
Terechenko, Vladimir Pedrovich and Florence Desmoulins
George Piper Dances
Rating: 
At
Sadler's Wells, London
By Judith Mackrel
The
Ballet Boyz may be new to the business of artistic direction, but their latest
show puts them alongside dance's most grown-up players. After just two years of
running George Piper Dances, William Trevitt and Michael Nunn have a repertoire
any major company would covet, along with an ensemble of world-class dancers.
GPD take the stage with a justified air of entitlement - though it's good to see
a chipper edge of adventure still marking their company style.
Dominating
their new program is Mesmerics, expanded from the short trio Christopher
Wheeldon choreographed for GPD last year. The work has lost none of its
compressed intensities as Wheeldon accumulates movement upon the building blocks
of Philip Glass's hypnotic cello score. The dancers negotiate within charged
confines, but progressively the movement pulls them dynamically apart. It is a
work profligate in human nuance and choreographic intelligence in which all five
dancers luxuriate as gratefully as the audience. As Trevitt explains in a
linking video clip, working with William Forsythe is a mind-altering experience,
and during the opening of the latter's Approximate Sonata, I, V, Trevitt starts
from a place deep inside himself, his body constantly readjusting its stance.
Eventually he is joined by Oxana Panchenko, but, even as they open out to
full-bodied movement, the rhythms of thought remain curiously visible. Trevitt
and Nunn have chosen to retain a clear British identity. They sign off with
their exemplary signature duet, Critical Mass, while the other new work is from
Cathy Marston. This semi-narrative duet in which two women communicate their
life stories lacks the clear emotional focus of which Marston is capable. But
she heightens the contrast between Monica Zamora's dark gravity and Panchenko's
more skittering detachment. It's a nice twist, too, to have an all-female piece
performed by a company whose image started out so feistily male.
Kirov
Ballet – Nutcracker
No
holiday season is complete without Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Kirov
Ballet brings Mikhail Chemiakin’s production of the classic fairy tale to the
Kennedy Center for the first ballet engagement in the newly renovated Opera
House. Premiered at the Kirov’s 2001 Mariinsky Festival, Chemiakin’s
Nutcracker is highlighted with spectacular set and costume designs inspired
by the darker side of the story by E.T.A. Hoffman, which represents a departure
from the traditional children’s version. The company’s dancing is
“superb” (Clement Crisp, Financial Times) and Kirill Simonov’s
choreography is based on the original libretto by Marius Petipa.
Scottish
Ballet
Rating:
At
The Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
By
Judith Mackrel
When Ashley Page agreed to take on the
ailing Scottish Ballet, he insisted that he wouldn't be running just another
minor ballet troupe. Certainly, Edinburgh's first glimpse of its revamped
national company showed it had changed out of recognition. Page's
determination to present world-class choreography means that he has drawn his
repertory equally from ballet and modern vision .
The single factor uniting the program is a
highly evolved sense of form. In Richard Alston's Dangerous Liaisons (1985),
the choreography seems to be patterned around the intricate internal wiring of
Simon
Water's
electronic score. The dancers are strung out along the music's jagged
currents, they pulse gently to its low-voltage moments of calm, they are
propelled through patterns as necessary as magnetic force fields. Where
Alston's structures are luminously visible, Stephen Petronio's service steps
that are outrageously slutty and gaudy. Middle Sex Gorge, first created in
1990 around Petronio and his then partner Michael Clark, features men in pink
corsets kissing and women casually fondling their own crotches. But within
this erotic romp the dancers are also executing brazenly articulate steps and
navigating phenomenally clever structural tropes. The chemistry been brains
and body is riveting - and rivetingly different from the passionate calm of
Siobhan Davies's White Man Sleeps (1988). Set to Kevin Volans's score, this
constructs a spacious world and peoples it with sensuously alert, delicately
questing men and women. Emerging as it does from such deep coils of emotional
and physical impulse, this is the hardest of all the works for a ballet-based
company, and it's a measure of their success that Davies's original cast seem
to shadow and shape the performance. Page's own Cheating, Lying, Stealing
(originally made for the Royal Ballet in 1998) delivers what it promises: a
group of damaged, promiscuous men jiggered up with the rogue sexual energy
that comes from the break-up of affairs. With David Lang and Michael Gordon's
music winding the tension to screaming point, Page expertly pitches his dance
so that we're both fascinated and repelled by his protagonists' seedy glamour.
Edinburgh welcomed the company with cheers, and while Page will have to
lighten some of his repertory some of the time, this debut performance felt, heroically, like the laying down of a gauntlet.
End of the
article.