Ballet

Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could and should extend its reach beyond boy meets sylph and began wrestling with heavyweight essay subjects such as the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Mayerling) or the last of the Romanovs (Anastasia). And now look: Queen Victoria, the pointe shoe years, a bold, good-looking ballet that almost triumphs over the absurdity of its premise. Cathy Marston’s latest work for Northern Ballet follows the success of her 2016 Jane Eyre, a spare, clever reworking of the novel that will be danced by American Ballet Theatre in New York this June.

The trouble with Don Quixote is Don Quixote. Whenever the doddering, delusional Don is onstage, tilting at windmills, riding his straw-and-sawdust nag on wheels, jousting with bedposts, our spirits and sympathies suffer. Quixote’s quest only really works as an excuse for Kitri, Basilio, Espada the Matador and Mercedes the street minx to dance up a La Mancha storm. This they do, with bells on. In toreador waistcoat, tight taleguilla and pink stockings to match his cape, Ryoichi Hirano is the Mata-phwoar. The corps de ballet swoon and flutter. He is sexy, even caddish. I was a Hirano doubter, but this was a magnificent performance: athletic power matched by classical control. A bullfighter one moment, ballerino the next. Laura Morera as his firebrand lover Mercedes is underpowered.

If you like the BBC’s Les Misérables, you’ll love English National Ballet’s Manon. Manon, in Kenneth MacMillan’s telling, is The Glums in tights. Alina Cojocaru dances Manon, an 18th-century courtesan in Paris, pimped by her brother Lescaut (Jeffrey Cirio). She falls for Des Grieux (Joseph Caley), young, handsome, penniless, love’s young dream, and is later ensnared by the older, richer, crueller Monsieur GM. Cojocaru is sublime. ‘That’s her!’ whispered my neighbour in the stalls as Manon fluttered through the crowd at the inn. With Des Grieux, Cojocaru is sweet and expressive, tender and teasing. As Monsieur’s mistress, in diamonds and furs, she dances with quiet power and cold command.

The Royal Ballet is a company in search of a prince. It has no lack of dancing princesses. You could search the kingdom and find no lovelier dancers than Marianela Nunez, Lauren Cuthbertson, Francesca Hayward, Natalia Osipova, Akane Takada, Sarah Lamb, Laura Morera and Yasmine Naghdi. But a true prince is as rare as a golden egg. Since Sergei Polunin went so energetically awol in 2012, the Royal Ballet has lacked a male principal with all four virtues of the leading man: classic handsome looks, height, faultless technique and some gift as an actor. Polunin had it all. He was dishy, dashing and dangerous. He had a fifth quality, too: seductive, flaring charisma. The company was less without him, and he lost without them.

La Bayadère opens with a sacred flame and ends with an earthquake. In between, Marius Petipa’s ballet of 1877 gives us an India of the imagination, an India that never was. It is a place of tigers and tutus, scimitars and slippers. Cultural appropriation, you say? But who could object when it’s all so Pondicherry pretty: a durbar dream of silk harem pants, beaded bracelets, sun-goddess gowns, swags of hibiscus, palanquins, hookah pipes, snakes, divans and dances of the seven tie-dyed veils. The temple backdrops are gorgeous and preposterous. I’m the king of the swingers, oh… Besides you can hardly culturally appropriate when the company of the Royal Ballet is the grandest of grand bazaars.

Like it or not, provincial ballet audiences love a story they can hum and any director planning to tour a swan-light, sugar plum-free menu has always done so at their peril. Tchaikovsky isn’t compulsory: a really well-known story, however undanceable, can usually do decent business (Northern Ballet’s extremely silly Three Musketeers is a reliable granny-magnet). But less familiar titles can be box-office poison — as English National Ballet is forever discovering. When the former Royal Ballet star Tamara Rojo took over in 2012, she immediately set about breaking down the vanilla tastes of ENB’s regional fanbase with a lavish new production of Le Corsaire.

Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling is a #MeToo minefield. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary is a serial seducer, a man of many mistresses, a grabber of princesses. Were he alive and kissing today, he’d check himself into an Arizona rehab clinic. In 1889, it was laudanum and a loaded pistol. Rudolf ought to be tormented, driven by ennui and the oppression of the imperial court to darker and darker thrills. Ryoichi Hirano, who opens the Royal Ballet’s 2018/19 season as the Crown Prince, is not dark enough. It is his debut as Rudolf and his performance is studied and contained. Hirano is handsome, tall, Apollonian.

William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist. But nothing, he claims, to warrant US government officials showing up, unannounced, at his door and threatening him with arrest. Had he been reported by an angry dance purist, perhaps? After all, this is the choreographer who has done more than any other to push the limits of what ballet can be, the great forward-thinker hailed for his athletic, sometimes bewildering, deconstructions of an art form that goes back centuries. It’s gained him an army of devoted (read obsessive) fans, but also some vocal detractors.

‘Ballet is woman’ insisted George Balanchine, but ballet can also be a big man in a dress as any fan of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo will testify. The Trocks began life in 1974, dancing for a select few in pop-up performance spaces in Manhattan, but the troupe’s irresistible blend of low comedy and high art soon outgrew its coterie audience. By the mid-1980s it was a fixture on the national and international tour circuit. Japan, with its ancient tradition of cross-dressing onnagata, is practically a second home. Classical ballet has long been a soft target for physical comedy — think of Freddie Starr retrieving a packet of Rothmans from the ‘lunchbox’ at the front of his tights or Morecambe and Wise joining the four little swans.

The Royal Ballet’s 2016 Frankenstein was a masterclass in how not to make narrative dance and the news that Liam Scarlett had been chosen to spring-clean and ‘reimagine’ Swan Lake had many balletomanes reaching for the smelling salts (it doesn’t take much, to be honest). It was sighs of relief and trebles all round when the new production premièred at Covent Garden last week: proper tutus; gorgeous designs; first-rate dancing. The critical response has been largely positive but not everyone had a five-star evening. The Daily Telegraph gave it a niggardly three stars, finding the designs ‘variable’ and bewailing the absence ofa dramaturg (which has to be some sortof first).

The Shaolin monks are no strangers to the stage. Their home in Dengfeng is a major stop on the Chinese tourist trail and their lives of quiet contemplation (and shouty martial arts practice) are regularly punctuated by spells on the international circuit with Kung Fu extravaganzas like Wheel of Life and Shaolin Warriors. Quite how they square this six-shows-a-week-plus-matinees life with the whole monk ethic is a question for their Abbot or, just possibly, their agent (Shaolin Intangible Assets Management Co. Ltd. Yes, really). But they put on a very good show, the best of which is Sutra, devised by Belgo-Moroccan dancemaker Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and performed in an installation by Turner-winning sculptor Antony Gormley.

Gurn loves Effy, Effy is engaged to James but James is away with the fairies: a recipe for love tragedy. Tamara Rojo’s English National Ballet hasn’t danced August Bournonville’s La Sylphide since 1989 (before most of today’s dancers were born or thought of). The easy elevation and unshowy brilliance of the Danish style do not come naturally to them but their accents have improved since the dispiriting première in Milton Keynes last October. The character ensembles look perkier although the garish tartan choices make poor Effy’s big, fat Highland wedding look like a lock-in at a Royal Mile souvenir shop. The sylph’s 18 sisters were unfailingly tidy but the sense of otherworldly lightness was missing.

You can pay homage to a ballet classic or you can tear it up and reinvent it. Both approaches were on offer in London a fortnight ago: a revival of Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, set to Léo Delibes’s 1876 score, and a Swan Lake from Michael Keegan-Dolan that ditches Tchaikovsky, tutus and toe shoes and relocates the story to a dysfunctional community in the Irish midlands. There’s an eerie, gaslit vibe to the Royal Ballet’s Sylvia. Look along the row and you half expect the audience to be styled to match its Second Empire pastiche: epaulets, lorgnettes, rickets. When Ashton made Daphnis et Chloé, his other nymphs’n’shepherds ballet, in 1951, he professed himself bored by ‘people running around in tunics’ and opted for modern dress.

Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There were painters and sculptors on his mother’s side, but they were thought very frivolous. Romain de Tirtoff (‘Erté’ came from the French pronunciation of his initials) was born in 1892 at the St Petersburg Naval School where his father Pyotr was inspector. When he was a little boy, his aunt bought him a set of wooden soldiers. Instinctively, he hated war, violence and, above all, uniforms. He burst into tears and threw the box out of the window. What he liked best was to play with his mother’s old perfume bottles, which he dressed in scraps of lace to make ballerinas.

Ballet would have been an obvious revenue stream for Sadler’s Wells when it reopened back in 1998 but straight-up classics have been few and far between over the past two decades — the Rothbart of the Royal Ballet of Flanders’ Swan Lake wore a live owl on his head. And yet, while the theatre’s programming fights shy of tutus and toe shoes, its fiercely contemporary output can sometimes bridge the notorious gulf that has traditionally divided classical and contemporary audiences. Wayne McGregor has been resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet since 2006 but combines this role — and countless international projects — with his directorship of his own company, whose Autobiography premièred at the Wells earlier this month.

Dance is an ephemeral art. It keeps few proper records of its products. Reputations are written in rumours and reviews. And by reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet — its destroyer, if you listen to some. They think this country’s classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld. It’s an absurd reduction, since Ashton was quite as screwed up as MacMillan, but the notion persists of the two of them embodying opposite sides of the British ballet coin, order and chaos. Both giants left the Royal Ballet dozens and dozens of ballets, which critics recorded were amazing things.

Alice is at it again. Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 three-act ballet began another sell-out run at Covent Garden last week. It’s a joy to look at and packed with featured roles that show off the Royal Ballet’s strength in depth. If only it weren’t such a bore: thinly written characters; anodyne choreography and zero dramatic tension. To be fair, the episodic dream logic of the original doesn’t make for a coherent or involving narrative. Wheeldon and his scenarist, Nicholas Wright, have done their best to correct for this by tacking on a Wizard of Oz-style prologue in which the Caterpillar, Dormouse et al. are human guests at an Oxford tea party.

Where was Degas standing as he sketched his ‘Laundresses’ (c.1882–4)? Did he watch the two women from behind sheets hanging to dry? Or was he hidden by steam from the basins? The laundry women are unselfconscious, unguarded. One reads aloud from a list, calling out shirts, collars, cuffs to be washed and ironed. Another leans over her workbench, staring into the placket of a folded shirt like Narcissus into his pool. Neither is the least bit bothered by the artist making a rapid chalk sketch to be worked up later in pastel. Nor the two men in ‘At the Café de Châteaudun’ (c.1869–71), reading a newspaper with monocle and magnifying glass. Degas might be peering at them over the top of his menu. A coffee, a croissant, a sneaking sketch.