Compare and contrast
Giannandrea Poesio
Royal Ballet: Double Bill Royal Opera House
Theatre magic has a lot to do with the unpredictability of the performed event. Regardless of the alluring promise of an all-star cast or the doubts raised by daring artistic choices, there is no certain way to forecast what any live performance will be like. Indeed, it is this surprise/ disappointment factor that has kept me going for all the years I have spent both on stage and in front of it.
Last week I expressed some serious doubts about a Royal Ballet triple bill. The artistic flatness of the performances I saw impinged seriously on my desire to see more from the same company. But last Saturday I left the Royal Opera feeling in that very good mood so rarely experienced by critics.
Not unlike the previous triple bill, the new programme contrasts a 20th-century masterwork of American ballet history with a milestone of the British 20th-century repertoire. This time, instead of Serenade vs Homage to the Queen it is Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering (1969) vs Frederick Ashton’s The Dream (1964). Robbins’s 63-minute-long plotless ballet to piano music by Chopin, played with romantic gusto and abandon by Philip Gammon, used to be one of the Royal Ballet’s greatest hits in the golden days everyone raves about and claims to remember. I, too, recall those electrifying performances, but I am not willing to draw sterile comparisons; an art as ephemeral as ballet can be effectively evaluated only for what it is now and not in line with the illusory remains of inevitably fading memories. Unlike the Serenade performances I saw two weeks ago, Dances at a Gathering seems to have been restaged with unique care, stylistic finesse and, above all, great attention to the interpretative shadings. The first cast — Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo, Laura Morera, Lauren Cuthbertson, Sarah Lamb, Johan Kobborg, Martin Harvey, Federico Bonelli, Sergei Polunin and José Martín — was simply superb. Each artist conveyed the ballet’s subtle palette of contrasting emotions in such a vibrant way that on several occasions the whole audience held their breath.
Jerome Robbins insisted that there were no hidden narratives in this series of pure dance numbers and that there was no character definition either — he went so far as to state all that in capital letters in a note sent to the editor of Ballet Review and, appropriately, it is reproduced in Zoë Anderson’s scholarly programme note for the Royal Ballet. Still, Robbins’s choreography is never fully abstract. The various combinations devised for the various sections create, more or less intentionally, a distinctive psychological make-up for the various roles — even though it is then up to their interpreters to develop their own responses to those subtly embedded directions.
Personally, I found the female contingent more theatrically effective than the male one, even though I enjoyed the humorous skirmishes between Kobborg and Harvey, Bonelli’s dashingly carefree attitude and Polunin’s intense lyricism. Cojocaru sent me to heaven with her breathlessly sustained legatos, while Rojo captured my attention with her commanding elegance. Morera and Lamb were also brilliant, but I think that Cuthbertson is the one who deserves a special mention for her sparkling humorous performance.
I have written many times about The Dream so I will not reiterate how much I love this work, a true masterwork of narrative dance-making. The performance I saw on Saturday was fizzy, as the ballet ought to be, and elicited laughter where it should. I regret to report that Ludovic Ondiviela, a splendidly androgynous Puck, sustained a rather horrid-looking injury towards the end, seconds before that technically demanding section set to Mendelssohn’s scherzo. The curtain went down, but then Monica Mason, the artistic director of the Royal Ballet, announced that ‘another Puck’ had been found in the house. To make a début in those circumstances and at that particular point in the ballet is no easy task, but first artist James Wilkie caused a sensation as a truly daredevil goblin. As Oberon, Ivan Putrov confirmed his place once more as an ideal successor to Anthony Dowell, who created the role, moving fluidly from demanding passages to dreamy lyrical longheld poses. Roberta Marquez, as Titania, has the perfect physique du rôle, and the technical abilities. But she ought to remember that this is not a soubrette role and thus should tone down the flashy coquettishness she indulged in. Among the others, Rupert Pennefather, Johannes Stepanek, Cindy Jourdain and Laura McCulloch were flawless as the lovers and Bennet Gartside was ideal as Bottom. If it is an evening of good dance you are after, do not miss it.
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