The choreographic partnership of Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot has long been celebrated in mainland Europe: a new double bill presented by the Royal Ballet is the first time their work has been showcased for British audiences. The first-night reception to Covent Garden was rapturous, but I wonder how long the excitement will last.
What an astounding masterpiece this ballet is. I adore it, who couldn’t?
Leon and Lightfoot specialise in movement characterised by a nervous staccato, suggestive both of psychic anxiety and robotic precision: the dancers look demented or brain-dead, animatronically controlled. Black is the dominant colour (Leon and Lightfoot are often their own designers) and the lighting does more to shade than illuminate. It is all very chic indeed.
Shoot the Moon, performed to a piano concerto by Philip Glass, has undoubted visceral power. Three empty rooms are seen in rotation. Two couples are in crisis, shrieking and vomiting and generally tearing into each other: one pair is locked into a folie à deux that looks like it will end in suicide; in another room, a woman seeks escape through an affair in a third room with a lonely man, leaving her partner in despair. This basic scenario provides a tight frame for the depiction of relentless angst, and for some superb performances – particularly those of Matthew Ball and Lauren Cuthbertson, charged with furious intensity.
Salle de danse follows. It’s essentially a revision of Harald Lander’s old chestnut Études, built on the routines of a daily ballet class, but here wittily complicated, inverted, and parodied. A cavalcade of dancers – half the company, from prima ballerinas to newbies in the corps – are given the chance to show off their fanciest moves without being seriously challenged. The music is jolly and it’s a fun-filled cavalcade, though not one that justifies its hour-long duration.
Ever since its première in 1960, all performances at Covent Garden of Ashton’s bucolic comedy La Fille mal gardée have featured a cute Shetland pony. Specially hired from a licensed trainer, royally pampered in the wings, the pony is slowly led across the stage pulling a small cart containing the heroine and her mother. Professionally chaperoned for this undemanding assignment, the pony is only on stage for a minute but its appearance invariably draws an innocent sigh of delight from the audience.
No more. Doubtless as the result of barracking by some vociferous animal-rights lobby, the pony has now been replaced by a nursery rocking-horse. It is not without its own charm, admittedly, but in protecting the unknowable sensitivities of a dumb animal, let us not forget that it’s the dancers who suffer for La Fille ma gardeé. All their spectacular lifts and fancy footwork, all their grands jetés and spinning fouettés, are the product of sweated years of whiplash training and Olympic levels of dedication and sacrifice often resulting in lifelong injuries to tendons and ligaments. So where is the petition to replace these wretchedly exploited victims of a heartless system with computerised avatars such as appear in the Abba show? Holograms would be so much cheaper too. Real live human beings, who needs them!
Such nonsense aside, a final run of the current season’s revival brought several notable debuts. I caught Mayara Magri and Leo Dixon, an oddly matched but delightful pair. Both are 90 per cent of the way there. Magri has the measure of Lise and needs only to pick up speed in order to sparkle; Dixon struggled a bit technically (he’s been off injured for five months), but he’s an absolute charmer with bags of elegance and style. Best of all was James Hay, both hilarious and poignant as Lise’s scorned suitor Alain. What an astounding masterpiece this ballet is – so enchantingly sunny and funny on the surface, so brilliantly inventive and fiendishly demanding underneath. I adore it, who couldn’t? And it trounces the modishness of Leon and Lightfoot at every imaginable level of artistry.
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