Carlos acosta

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.

Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent. Between some highlights of the most familiar Fokine repertory, an extract from Nijinska’s Les Biches has oddly been inserted, and there was nothing here to suggest the fact that Massine was by far the most dominant choreographer of the Ballets Russes’s interwar era and someone indeed who had personally worked with BRB in its previous incarnation.

My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers of her flame Tanztheater Wuppertal are back in town to present one of her later works, Vollmond (‘Full Moon’), to ecstatic standing room-only congregations in her temple at Sadler’s Wells. What a bad, bad influence the Blessed Pina has had on dance, providing inspiration for hundreds of her imitators to pull the wool over our eyes by peddling their own pallid versions of her formulas.

After taking a wrong turn culminating in the misbegotten Frankenstein, Akram Khan has wisely returned to his original inspiration in kathak, the ancient dance culture of northern India synthesising both Hindu and Muslim mysticism and mythology. The result is something deeply impressive and beautiful that held me enraptured for an hour. This is the work of a serious artist, without gimmicks or frills, and there isn’t much of that around at the moment. Starting with massive thunderclaps in primal darkness, Gigenis takes us through the cycle of creation, tracing the same epic path as the Mahabharata through fire and air, the birth of a hero, a courtship and marriage, a family feud, a war, a victory, defeat and death.

Not being an aficionado of the heavy-metal genre, I snootily suspected that I would rather be standing in the rain flogging the Big Issue than suffer the racket that goes by the name of Black Sabbath. The noise, my dear, and the people! How could they? So I approached Birmingham Royal Ballet’s attempt to dance to its shenanigans armed with earplugs and gritted teeth. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected: in fact, it erred towards the polite and tasteful, and I wondered if a crowd largely consisting of hairy and leathery old rockers – some of them possibly anticipating satanic rituals or heads being bitten off chickens – got much out of it.

In 2015 Carlos Acosta announced his retirement from the Royal Ballet and the classical repertory. It seemed like the right moment; he was 42 and, truth to tell, some of us could detect a slight waning of his prowess and physique. Time to move on: since then, he has done great work in his native Cuba and is currently a venturesome artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet. He is a rather wonderful person. Eight years after his withdrawal from Covent Garden, however, he has made a brief return – addressing an itch, he says, that had to be scratched. The house sold out for five nights running and the reception was rapturous, but I am left with mixed feelings.

When Carlos Acosta was named artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January of this year, he announced ambitious plans for his inaugural season, but the pandemic swiftly derailed these. Lazuli Sky, recently performed for live audiences in Birmingham and London, is his first commission to come to fruition, and while the programme has been scaled down from its original incarnation — with fewer dancers, musicians and audience members — it lives up to the panache of the company’s usual mixed bills and even manages to pull off a world première by Will Tuckett, a lodestar of contemporary British ballet.