Pam Tanowitz

Too much ballet these days is top-heavy with narrative that would be better served by the spoken word than it is by body language. And too few choreographers know how to engage with music, rather than using it as a mere sonic backdrop. So what a blessed relief it was to encounter Pam Tanowitz’s utterly delightful Pastoral, which is guilty of neither of these failings. I enjoyed it so much that I was compelled to go back and see it again, at my own considerable expense, two days later. Pastoral lasts for an hour or so, but seems to ignore tick-tock time: it is both simple and complex, naive and sophisticated.

After opening its 2024/5 season with a run of Christopher Wheeldon’s candy-coloured, kiddie-friendly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Royal Ballet gets down to business with a demanding but exhilarating programme of new work. Newish, to be accurate; the evening’s only previously unseen piece is Joseph Toonga’s Dusk. Crystal Pite’s The Statement is eight years old and was previously seen at Covent Garden in 2021; Kyle Abraham’s The Weathering followed a year later; and Pam Tanowitz’s Or Forevermore has developed out of a duet that originated during the pandemic. Dusk and The Weathering call for little comment. Both are well-crafted and safely generic, elegiac in mood and unassertive in theme.