Manon
Maylower, Southampton, and on tour
Sankai Juku
Sadler's Wells, London EC1
The title role in Kenneth MacMillan's Manon is one of the great ballerina challenges. The feckless, attention-craving sister of a pimp in 18th-century France, Manon Lescaut is torn between the improvident Des Grieux, who loves her, and the wealthy, vicious Monsieur GM who wants to own her. The classic femme fatale, she makes choices at every turn that will lead to tragedy. The work has been performed at Covent Garden since its creation in 1974, but English National Ballet is touring it for the first time. The lead role has proved a triumph for ENB's Agnes Oaks, who retires this year after almost two decades with the company, and last week it was the turn of 34-year-old Elena Glurdjidze.
Georgian-born Glurdjidze has clearly thought deeply about her character's motivation and invests her with a fearful self-knowledge. From the moment she meets Des Grieux (Arionel Vargas), she's aware of her own mercurial nature and in their bedchamber duet melts only hesitantly. When she catches the eye of Monsieur GM (James Streeter), it's with a visible frisson; it's as if she sees her fatal susceptibility to male power reflected in his gaze.
At every stage, she hovers on the brink before fatalistically abandoning herself and the result, as she careers towards dissolution, is as tragic as it is touching. Inexperienced Manons tend to overplay the technical challenges but Glurdjidze does the opposite: her dancing is so unforced, so quietly and precisely pitched, as to be invisible. All you register is her elusive beauty and the anguished tide of her emotions.
She is finely supported by Vargas's likable Des Grieux and Zhanat Atymtayev's venal Lescaut, while Streeter is a compellingly repulsive GM. Mia Stensgaard's designs are inferior to those at Covent Garden, but superlative lead performances by Glurdjidze, Oaks and others make this a production to seek out. The tour continues until May.
Before a backdrop made of hundreds of dried tuna tails nailed to bleached planking, a man is dancing in slow motion with a live peacock to the sound of distant percussion. His head is shaved and his body painted white. The peacock walks free and begins to peck at the stage. Four more white-painted men, naked except for G-strings, advance downstage, as numinous as Antony Gormley statues, and begin to wrestle in pools of light to Miles Davis music.
This is just one of many enigmatic tableaux in Kinkan Shonen (Kumquat Seed) by Japanese butoh company Sankai Juku. Butoh evolved in the 1960s as a reaction to highly codified theatre forms like Noh and its distilled nature and dreamlike imagery have had a profound influence on Western dance. Do those fish tails refer to our factory-scale destruction of the natural world? Is the peacock just a peacock or a symbol of our vanity? Impossible to say, but the Sankai Juku performers have somehow slowed time to a standstill and that alone is cause for wonder.
