Dance

It is the end of an era — the Royal Ballet’s extravagant Fabergé-egg Swan Lake production by Anthony Dowell is on its last legs. When this 28-year-old production finishes the current run on 9 April, that will be it for one of the most controversial classical productions of the past half-century. It’s the one set in Romanov Russia, festooned with ribbons and golden squiggles, with swans in champagne ball-gowns rather than pristine white feathers. Hallucinatory, glamorous and opulently symbolist? Or hectic, fussy and tatty? Adjectives divide between the adoring and the withering for Yolanda Sonnabend’s Gustave Moreau-esque designs and for Dowell’s hyperactive staging.

The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious contemporary ballet by Russell Maliphant and Kim Brandstrup, but he’s a bit of a Macavity. He ought to be recognised as a star, but he effaces himself award-winningly in others’ work. That chameleon quality is a problem with his venture into the solo limelight, a Charlie Chaplin tribute, SMILE, on the Sadler’s Wells triple bill of associate choreographers last week. Franzén’s mercurial moves are always thrilling to watch, and his creative extension of Chaplinesque capering into some acrobatic popping and b-boying does OK in making the Little Tramp a street brother of hip-hop’s outsiders.

January is something of a palate-cleanser for the year, as the London International Mime Festival flies in plane-loads of companies bearing gnomic names in a kind of dance-world Desperanto that’s equally incomprehensible in every language. Like cars or tourist T-shirt slogans, titles like Plexus or Ephemeral Architectures label what’s now called ‘visual theatre’, with copious explanatory notes translated between four languages, gaining comic value at every stage. I don’t know why they don’t just write, ‘We’re playing. The sponsor paid.’ (Mark Morris is the only choreographer I know who says, ‘I make up dances and you watch ’em.

What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera. Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness are out and 24-style metal walkways and gantries are in.

A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places, I’d urge you to resolve to dust off the private jet and get to Paris quick this weekend hoping to find a ticket somehow for the last Châtelet performances of An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s s’wonderful, s’marvellous new staging of the Gershwin/Minnelli musical film. Or book for New York in March when the show moves to its second home on Broadway. But surely there must be a UK run soon. It’s the first big dance-musical of the Royal Ballet’s favourite son, which is why we should pay attention. The secret of Christopher Wheeldon’s current status at 41 as blue-eyed boy of the Western ballet world is his geniality.

I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger on Sacred Monsters, the captivating conversation-piece at Sadler’s Wells for Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan — conversational being the word, for these genius dancers also talk to us, which is rather like Garbo laughing. Guillem’s voice is a delightful discovery: it’s a soprano timbre, bubbling Frenchly with dropped aitches and baroque flexibility. She tells us cute stories about Charlie Brown’s sister ‘Sall-ee’ and her wish always to be ‘émerveillée’in life, while Khan confides his anxiety about balding.

If you follow dance or music closely, make them part of your life, you look on certain performers as your daemon. These are the artists who become part of your inner landscape. They act as a tuning fork for your emotions and imagination. And you mark their progress with particular hope that you won’t be disappointed. When the 25-year-old Sylvie Guillem arrived in London in 1989 from Paris Opera Ballet, with a flaming reputation as Rudolf Nureyev’s prodigal daughter, one’s first reaction was wariness. She seemed so flashy in her incredible bodily gifts.

English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann, colleagues but of different instincts, one for dance, the other for drama. The case is currently being made for each by the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet. But how to revive the sensations and imaginings of the 1940s? It was long before most of us were even born, and more than any other art form ballet is dependent on evoking memory, atmospheres, intangible associations. Ashton, who emerged as the creative giant of the Royal Ballet’s nurturing, has recently been as out of fashion as furs and cocktail parties.

What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon opened the new ballet season. Kenneth MacMillan’s gold-digger turns 40 this year but her promiscuous allure shows no signs of failing punters with money to burn on sex thrills. I once took my partner to see Sylvie Guillem as Manon. His verdict was, ‘Too immoral’. I guess he got MacMillan’s point rather well. Manon has no heart at all, she is deliciously low. Since 1974 she has dodged bullets when powers-that-be proposed that a conscienceless tart had no place in the Royal repertoire.

Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic, Monday), the new, must-see Mafioso series, started promisingly. We met two hoods — one young, shaven-headed, good-looking; one weary, brow-beaten, middle-aged — filling up at a petrol station in Naples, an unfamiliar (to me anyway) setting that looks promisingly like a cross between Vegas and downtown Gaza. Clearly they were up to no good. Meanwhile, in a decrepit apartment block, an elderly mamma was preparing her beloved, twentysomething son a rather delicious-looking pasta dinner. She chastised him for smoking at the dinner table. The son tried explaining, to no avail, that this was an E-cigarette, not a real one. Mamma wasn’t having it. She said grace and her nicely brought up if wayward boy crossed himself piously.

Last Friday, ballet’s overcrowded aviary welcomed a new addition: Raven Girl.  Sexy, sleek, troubled and troublesome, she is the creation of the bestselling author Audrey Niffenegger and Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor.  Expectations were high, as McGregor is not a choreographer one would normally associate with balletic storytelling. The work, with stunning designs by Vicki Mortimer, splendid lighting by Lucy Carter, great video design by Ravi Deepres and a lusciously seductive score by Gabriel Yared, enthrals the senses and sits perfectly with McGregor’s vision of a creatively synergetic unity of the arts. It’s a pity that neither the choreo-graphy nor the dramaturgy were as impressive.