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In the Royal Ballet's hyped triple bill, a classic proved fresher than the premières
It was the evening that the White Stripes came to the Royal Ballet - or at least their music did, in a slick arrangement by the classical composer and one-time member of the Divine Comedy Joby Talbot. The event on 17 November was one of the most hungrily anticipated ballet nights of the year - and yet, for dance fans, that had more to do with the two important premières of the night, by the young British choreographers Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. Whisper it: dance fans may have heard pop music before; what's more, they may be used to experiencing pop paired with dance steps. After all, Michael Clark, to mention just one name, has been putting ballet-derived choreography together with punk for longer than 20 years.
Chroma is McGregor's ballet to music by the White Stripes and from the new orchestral album by Talbot and Richard Russell, Alumi nium. Ten stars of the Royal Ballet, in off-white costumes, were contained in an unadorned white box by the minimalist architect John Pawson. They seemed to become architectural elements in themselves, but with their wild, angular movements kicking against and disrupting the still centre of Pawson's blank edifice. The visceral whirl of the music pumped up the adrenaline - although Christopher Austin's orchestrations sounded more like a 1970s film score than anything to scare the Swan Lake-loving ladies in the stalls. At times filmy and boneless, at other moments pointed and fiercely articulated, this was choreography that had its audience in thrall.
There was luxury casting: Federico Bonelli, Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo and Edward Watson, as well as the up-and-coming stars Sarah Lamb and Lauren Cuthbertson. Cojocaru's strong, spider-web fragility was beautifully displayed in Talbot's ethereal "Transit of Venus", the penultimate sequence before the whole ensemble brought the piece crashing to its close. For dancers whose seasons are dominated by classical revivals, this piece was new and exciting territory - so much so, perhaps, that they rather charmingly fluffed their curtain call, almost unheard of in the perfectly graceful, utterly flawless world of classical ballet.
The problem with sandwiching a modern classic between two premières is that it tends to invite unfair comparisons. George Balanchine's Four Temperaments still looked completely fresh, almost 60 years to the day after its own première on 20 November 1946. Some critics see The Four Temperaments as even more significant for choreographic modernism than the first performance of The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913. Whereas Nijinsky's steps for the Stravinsky masterpiece created a sort of anti-ballet, a cul-de-sac for the art form's progress, The Four Temperaments pointed the way forward. From the vantage point of today, it looks like the first room in an enfilade of developments, from Martha Graham to Merce Cunningham and beyond.
As the title suggests, the work is based on the idea of the four humours: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric, which make for variations of contrasting moods. Watson, all feet and hands, magnetic in his stage presence, made witty work of the phlegmatic variation. But this is also a piece about ensemble, beautifully made, punctuated with enormous care and skill such that its structure is generously opened out for the audience's pleasure.
The finale of the triple bill was the second première of the night - DGV, for 26 dancers, by Christopher Wheeldon. This Somerset-born choreographer, born in 1973, started out as a dancer with the Royal Ballet. In 1993, however, he was invited to join the New York City Ballet, the company co-founded by Balanchine. Choreography gradually took over from dancing, and Wheeldon is now regarded as one of the great hopes for ballet's future.
DGV stands for Danse à Grande Vitesse. Michael Nyman wrote the score - Musique à Grande Vitesse - for the inauguration of the TGV north European line, and it was first performed in Lille in 1993. Jean-Marc Puissant's design is a metallic structure, elements bolted together as if it were the aluminium shell of a plane. The piece, it turns out, seems to be about the strangely suspended experience of travel, Nyman's score pumping out a relentless pulse that culminates in a deafening tattoo on drums from the side of the stage as the work powers through to its des tination. Zenaida Yanowsky's almost queenly presence dominated the start of the work, somehow conveying that she might be swooping at speed through galaxies rather than moving, as in fact she was, with slow, elegant poise. By the end, the dancers were spinning like tops; this had been as much a journey of the imagination as a dance about speed.
Royal Opera House, London WC2
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