Ballet

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo were popular regulars at Washington’s Kennedy Center until Trump’s demented blast against decadent queerness. In truth the company is simply blameless pantomime, innocent fun for all the family. Based in the USA and clocking up 50 years tirelessly on the road, it consists of male dancers in drag gently parodying an art form deeply encoded in elaborate conventions that are ripe for mockery. The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, also draw on a now-forgotten phenomenon: the hand-to-mouth touring companies of the postwar years that themselves traded off the model of Diaghilev’s great enterprise.

You’re never too old to dance we are told nowadays. This encouraging injunction has been taken up by everyone from the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alessandra Ferri, who have found wondrously creative ways to compensate for their declining virtuosity and stamina, to septuagenarians who insist on bopping to Abba at their grandchildren’s wedding parties. I confess that in the interests of research I took to ballet classes when I was well into middle age: it was not a pretty or edifying sight. There is a lot to be said for oldies sticking to the military two-step. The Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard has a different view of the matter. Kontakthof is the work of the sainted Pina Bausch, dating from 1978.

Crystal Pite is one of a handful of truly original choreographers today, extending the boundaries of her art form without going all doolally about trendy gender issues, AI or neuroscience. She is rooted in something more universal – the tension between conflict and connection, between what draws us together and what keeps us apart. ‘We want to individuate,’ she says. ‘Yet we want to belong.’ Out of this grows Body & Soul, in which individuals fight their way out of great swarms and cocoons, only to be sucked back into an inexorable flow that snakes and stiffens, multiplies and divides.

‘Ballet is woman,’ Balanchine once gnomically pronounced. A remark not to be taken too literally, but essentially true. Like every afflicted balletomane, I can map out my lifelong passion for the art in terms of my adoration from afar of a succession of ballerinas – any awe I feel for their male counterparts is something quite different. First for me came Margot Fonteyn, of course – though I saw her only through the autumn of her career, when her body was stiffening and she relied on some divine inner grace to make an effect. (Meredith Daneman’s magnificent biography illuminates this weirdly complex woman, with her steely self-control, enormous generosity and poisonous political views.

The Royal Ballet has scheduled what – on paper at least – looks like one of the most dismally dull and cautious seasons I can recall. The company is hobbled by a £21.7 million government loan (that had tided the place over during Covid), which the Royal Opera House is being forced to ‘service’. One bright spot of interest comes with the commissioning of a new work from Cathy Marston and an import from New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck, slotted into a triple bill alongside Balanchine’s nocturne, Serenade. There’s not much to say about Peck’s Everywhere We Go. Big, bold, bright and much too long, it is devoid of shape or implication but bursting with jazzy Broadway energy, pumped up by a crude score by Sufjan Stevens.

The history of the male ballet dancer is a chequered one. In the early 19th century, he was the star of the show, albeit more as an acrobat and tumbler than fairy-tale prince. The vogue for sylph-like damsels floating in white tulle put paid to that, reducing him to the auxiliary role of porter and attendant. Then came the comet of Nijinsky, introducing a note of mysterious Slavic androgyny that left the male dancer suspiciously homosexual and prone to the ‘pink tights’ cliché. Nureyev and Baryshnikov cemented the exotic Russian connection, until the late 1990s when the allure of the musical Billy Elliot and Matthew Bourne’s version of Swan Lake opened ballet up to a generation of British boys who would otherwise have preferred kicking a football around.

Michael Keegan-Dolan’s show doesn’t even pretend to live up to the arresting proposition in its title – anyone hoping to glean a few useful tips on becoming a dancer would come away bitterly disappointed. What the Irish choreographer offers instead is a witty and touching exercise in autobiography in which he is ably abetted and illustrated by his resourceful wife, Rachel Poirier.  Born into a large and unlettered working-class family in north Dublin, Keegan-Dolan grew up jiving to Talking Heads and emulating Gene Kelly. Pigeon toes hobbled his four gruelling years in ballet training and as a performer he didn’t make it beyond the chorus line in West End musicals. He switched to choreography, mainly for opera, but soon jumped off that unrewarding treadmill.

Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new storehouse in Stratford’s Olympic Park are being enthralled by an atmospherically lit chamber devoted to the display of one vast and magnificent work of art: Picasso’s 10 metre-high, 11 metre-wide drop-curtain for Le Train Bleu, a popular hit of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, first seen in 1924. The canvas, for many years rolled up in storage, isn’t strictly the work of Picasso himself: Diaghilev’s scene painter Prince Alexander Schervashidze had meticulously expanded it overnight from a small gouache on plywood known as ‘Two Women Running on the Beach’ (1922), but Picasso was so delighted when he saw the result that he decided to endorse it with his signature on the bottom-left-hand corner.

It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a quick way of pulling in the punters, but the trick clearly does the business. Sadler’s Wells was pretty well full on the night I saw Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, a concept album that has endured several iterations and rewrites since the recording was first released on vinyl by the Who in 1973. An audience of all shapes and ages seemed to be having a good time, but although there’s nothing disgraceful about the show that director Rob Ashford has overseen, it seemed to me depressingly corny and laboured – a bumpy ride hitched to a creaky old bandwagon.

Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and I’m praying to St Jude that nobody is planning to import his dramatisation of Oscar Wilde’s downfall, premièred in Australia last year. But as the elegant craftsman, and sometimes the inspired artist, of more abstract dance, he is without doubt a great talent. The Royal Ballet’s programme of four of his shorter pieces showcases his strengths.

Interviewing for MI6 sounds to have been even scarier a century ago than it must be today. Candidates would enter an office to find a man with a ‘large intelligent head’ seated behind a desk and absorbed in paperwork. Everything would appear normal until he picked up a penknife and stabbed his own leg. A prospective agent who flinched at the sight might do himself out of the job. It is brilliant: carefully crafted, closely scripted, immaculately edited and best of all perfectly cast Rather like one of those rumoured Oxbridge interviews (candidates for a fellowship at All Souls were reportedly served a cherry pie at dinner to test what they would do with the stones), the ordeal was intended to weed out the weak.

One of the few indisputably great ballerinas of her generation, Natalia Osipova is a magnificent exemplar of the Russian school, her training at the Bolshoi furnishing her with a steely security of technique, powerful stage personality, and spirit of dauntless daring. Happily based at the Royal Ballet since 2013, she’s now also one of ours. As popular inside the company as she is with audiences, and much missed while she recuperated from an ankle operation last summer, she returned as the focus of a ‘curated’ evening in the intimate environment of the Linbury Theatre. First came a revival of a modernist classic: Martha Graham’s Errand into the Maze dates from 1947, with exiguous designs by Isamu Noguchi and an acerbic score by Gian Carlo Menotti.

Those of a violently masochistic disposition would have heartily enjoyed the Saturday matinée of the Strictly Come Dancing: Live Tour at the Utilita Arena, Birmingham. Talent loses out to glitter and hype, as shrieking vulgarity envelops all What deliciously perverse pleasure was to be drawn on this bleakly cold afternoon from the vast, snaking queues, the blared injunctions from the Tannoy, the drear concrete ambience, the over-priced merchandise tat and the chaos of the ultra-processed catering outlets – not to mention the £15 charge for leaving an empty backpack in the cloakroom. And then there was the show.

Since its première in Paris in 1841, Giselle has weathered a bumpy ride. For St Petersburg in 1884, Petipa gave Coralli and Perrot’s original choreography the once-over and Fokine grafted on further innovations when Diaghilev brought the ballet to London in 1911. Despite casts led by Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky, it bombed here with critics and audiences, who considered its archetypal Victorian plot of the innocent village maiden betrayed by the local squire prissy and musty. Only a generation later, when the likes of Markova and Ulanova assumed the title role, did the scenario’s mythic simplicity find new life, albeit in versions that departed quite radically from the primary text.