Giannandrea Poesio

Homage to the Queen is one of two ballets that Frederick Ashton conceived with a special occasion in mind —the other being Birthday Offering. Created in 1953, Homage was a choreographic celebration of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Not unlike the court masques of the 16th and 17th centuries, the ballet draws upon an allegorical pretext: the queens of Earth, Water, Fire and Air pay their tribute to the newly crowned monarch. The concept is typically Ashtonian, for it combines his great passion for, and knowledge of, past performing practices with his unique modern approach to classical ballet.

Staging the 1890 classic The Sleeping Beauty in the 21st century is not an easy task. Recent studies, discoveries and even philological reconstructions have heightened historical and stylistic awareness among dance-goers, thus generating expectations that cannot be easily overlooked. Yet philology and historical accuracy alone turn any work into a dead museum exhibit, at the expense of its vibrant theatricality. New ideas must thus be sought to enliven the old text and to make it viable for contemporary audiences.

Listing page content here Dance and eroticism have long gone hand in hand. For centuries, moving bodies have been regarded as arousing and dangerously tempting. Twenty-first-century adverts still draw upon that popular equation and delve more or less seriously into the intrinsic sensuality of dance, whether it be ballet, modern or even street dance. Yet the continuous bombardment of alluring images we are subjected to every day has somewhat tempered the erotic impact of those dancing bodies. Thanks to a multiplicity of urban, suburban, extra-urban, postmodern and transmodern cultures and meta cultures, today we are far more used to the sight of an erotically moving, and often perfect, body than we were only 15 years ago.

There is no doubt that BareBones’ The 5 Man Show will stay vividly in the memory of any dance-goer There is no doubt that BareBones’ The 5 Man Show will stay vividly in the memory of any dance-goer — and for a long time, too. This fizzy, moving, hilarious, corrosive triple bill is an ideal celebration of the company’s fifth year. Its five artists — numerologists would have a field day with such a recurrence of ‘fives’ — hypnotise the audience from their very first appearance, taking each viewer through a cogently formulated rollercoaster of emotions and vibrating theatre images.

Phoenix Dance Theatre is ‘25 years young’, as a filmed documentary shown halfway through last Thursday’s performance reminded us. The notion of youth is a relative one, particularly in the performing-arts world, where a quarter of a century is often regarded as a respectable old age, synonymous with a well-established reputation, a sound history and, arguably, a string of successes. Indeed, 25 years down the line, Phoenix remains a vibrant dance company that thrives on the collaboration with cutting-edge performance-makers. I was not surprised, therefore, to attend a programme, intriguingly entitled Stories in Red, that encompassed a wide variety of styles, techniques and forms; after all, artistic eclecticism has long been one of the company’s distinctive traits.

Oh joy, oh bliss, it is Nutcracker season again! Hordes of overdressed and overexcited children invade our theatres, much to the despair of those who know that the kids’ excitement and attention will fade as soon as they realise that neither the Mouse King nor the Sugar Plum Fairy can be incinerated by one of Lord Voldemort’s spells. Indeed, a Harry Potter-esque version of the unsinkable classic could be an appropriate addition to the long series of radical, humorous, gothic and psychoanalytical versions of the 1892 ballet that we have seen in the past years. Yet, London balletomanes will find no such thing, nor any other new Nutcracker in their stockings this year.

There seems to be a problem with the way some modern-day dance-makers deal with music. Twice in a fortnight, I have been confronted by works in which the score had no relevance to the choreography, and performers seemed to dance to a different tune. I am referring to Rafael Bonachela’s Curious Conscience, reviewed last week, and to Alastair Marriott’s Tanglewood, given its première last Monday by the Royal Ballet. In line with the assumption that ‘50 per cent of a ballet’s success stems from the right music’, Marriott has opted for an intriguing score, Ned Rorem’s Violin Concerto. As the composer explains in a captivating programme note, this is no traditional violin concerto.

More than a year since its re-emergence from oblivion, Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia keeps eliciting thunderous ovations. Not surprisingly, one might add. The restored three-acter is not just a shimmering tribute to Ashton’s genius; it is sheer fun, too. Indeed, ‘fun’ more than ‘artistic pleasure’ is what should be expected, for Sylvia is not one of those monoliths of ballet culture we normally attend in religious awe and contemplation. Originally created in 1876 in Paris, the work mirrored the crisis that underscored French choreography at that time. Little had survived of the golden epoch of the French Romantic ballet, and French theatre dance of the post Franco–Prussian war period suffered greatly from a sterile regurgitation of trite formulae.

Some dance works age, some don’t. Yet it is difficult to pinpoint the factors that bestow immortality on something as ephemeral as ballet. In the case of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, however, timelessness stems mainly, though not exclusively, from a masterly woven dramatic layout; it is through the possibility of diverse interpretative readings that the ballet constantly renews itself, thus standing the test of time and the changes in performance trends. Such interpretative flexibility is not synonymous with whimsical ad lib, though. The possible readings which the ballet offers to its performers draw upon a well-set choreography. Steps, gestures, solos, duets and choral dances resonate with all of MacMillan’s creative genius.

Mark Morris Dance Group has long been a regular feature of London dance seasons. Still, the power to surprise in Morris’s choreography has not waned. Take, for instance, the first of the two programmes presented last week at Sadler’s Wells, as part of the company’s 25th anniversary tour. Although signature traits informed each work’s choreography, their thematic construction, as well as their content, stood out for being anything but repetitive or monotonous. Morris has a unique way of working with music — any kind of music. His refreshing inventiveness seems to pour straight out of any score, be it a much-revered Baroque creation or the cheesiest pop tune in the world.

France has long been the cradle of ground-breaking new dance, thanks to a score of provocative performance-makers. It was about time, therefore, that an internationally renowned festival such as Dance Umbrella paid tribute to a country which has produced radical and revitalising choreography over the past three decades. Former enfant terrible of what has been appropriately referred to as the ‘French choreographic avant-garde’, Angelin Preljocaj is one of the leading figures of post-modern choreography.

It was with the 1832 ballet La Sylphide that Marie Taglioni acquired international repute and legendary status. Her angel-like, gravity-defying dancing earned her the affectionate appellation ‘Christian’ dancer, which sits somewhat uncomfortably with the mischievous nature of the eponymous role. Stark contradictions, however, were typical of the Romantic era: the idealised woman could be angel and demon, saint and whore, victim and executioner. Thanks to the enlightened vision of the Royal Ballet’s artistic director, Monica Mason, this Romantic work has now re-entered the company’s repertoire 173 years since its creation. And what a splendid addition it is.

The 2005 Dance Umbrella season kicked off last week with the London debut of the Forsythe Company, created after William Forsythe’s longstanding and successful collaboration with Frankfurt Ballet ended for debatable administrative and artistic reasons. The event attracted an audience of electrified Forsythe diehards, but was not memorable. The oddly mixed programme started with two recent (2002) and complementary creations, The Room As It Was and N.N.N.N. Each work focused on an in-depth study of how movements, be they large or minute, are generated in one body and can then transfer, with variations, repetitions, additions and reactions, to other bodies. The resulting action was frenziedly seamless.

I am always thrilled by a good performance of Giselle, especially when it is informed by choreographic consistency, dramatic fluidity and historical accuracy. That is why, last Friday, I left Sadler’s Wells in a jolly good mood. Indeed, Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s Giselle benefits greatly from the insight of its artistic director Alicia Alonso, a living legend and one of the 20th century’s greatest interpreters of the title role. Alonso’s acute sensitivity to the subtle nuances that underpin the classic does not stem solely from her dancing experience, but also draws clearly on historical research into the choreographic and performing formulae of the Romantic era.

Performance-makers like to experiment with creative modes and ideas. It is a natural urge in a world in which ‘new’ is synonymous with survival.

Unlike Giselle, Coppelia, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, the romantic ballet La Sylphide does not boast a memorable score. Neither the music, composed by Schneitzhoeffer for the original 1832 Parisian version, nor that composed by Lovenskjold for Auguste Bournonville’s 1836 Danish staging — arguably, the best-known today — have the luscious musical palette found in the works by Adam, Delibes or Tchaikovsky. Apart from chunks of ‘borrowed’ music, which include quotations from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in Schneitzhoeffer’s work and from Rossini’s Stabat Mater in Lovenskjold’s one, both scores merely provide easily danceable, pretty, catchy tunes and a wealth of tritely conventional atmospheric solutions.

In Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Giselle for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre there are no pretty peasants on pointes and no picturesque rustic cottages. What you get instead is a small Irish rural community thriving on poisonous gossip, petty jealousy and highly repressed sexual urges. The heroine, too, is not the quintessential embodiment of any Romantic female ideal. A total outcast suffering from asthma, she lost her voice the day she found out that her mother had hanged herself. Her father, an omnipresent lunatic narrator, lives on top of the electric pole that dominates, like a gigantic cross/totem, the village, represented by shifting props on a barren wooden platform.

For 100 years, ballet has been represented by the image of a ballerina with a feathered headdress and an arm raised as a quivering wing. Then, in 1995, came Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, and ballet’s icon lost its long-held supremacy. The Swan Princess met her masculine match: a bare-torsoed, bare-footed, muscled Adonis in feathery trousers. Never before, in ballet history, had the revisitation of a well-known work acquired the same iconic status as its predecessor. Almost ten years down the line, Bourne’s Swan Lake is still splendidly engaging. Central to it remains the amazing transformation of the traditional tutu-ed ladies into now fiery, now subtly ambiguous guys.

Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut occupies a special place in the history of ‘alternative’ versions of The Nutcracker. Created in 1991, it is an outstanding, wittily irreverent and thought-provoking example of choreographic revisitation. Without departing too radically from the familiar narrative of the 1892 ballet classic, Morris moved the action to the mid/late 1960s and adjusted the fairly silly original libretto, creating a tighter link with the E.T.A. Hoffmann story on which it was originally based. Hence a bemusing sequence in which the tale of the Hard Nut and Princess Pirlipat is enacted in Act II to entertain a flu-ridden version of the ballet’s young heroine, Marie.