Acosta Danza is the creation of Carlos Acosta, the Cuban-born dancer who retired from the ballet stage last year. As a performer, he will be remembered for the lustre of his dancing and for the vivid humanity that he brought to roles such as Romeo, Count Albrecht (in Giselle) and Crown Prince Rudolf (in Mayerling). Now, Acosta says, he wants to pass on all that he has learned to a new generation of dancers and has launched his own company, based in his native Havana.
Since its formation less than two years ago, Acosta Danza has performed all over the world; this is its first UK tour. Acosta’s ambition for the ensemble is reflected in the big-name choreographers he has assembled, and while the programme of five ballets stretches the dancers to the limit of their abilities, it gives us a good idea of their potential.
The evening opens with El cruce sobre el Niágara (The Crossing Over Niagara), choreographed by Marianela Boán. The piece is based on Alonso Alegría’s play about the 19th-century tightrope walker Blondin, who carries a friend over the Niagara Falls on his back. In Boán’s piece, the two men, danced with tense poise by Carlos Luis Blanco and Alejandro Silva and set to music by Olivier Messiaen, prepare for the dizzying feat. Physical balance must be mastered, but there’s also a power balance to be negotiated and the work becomes a meditation on human trust. The costumes could be subtler. “Man-thongs,” my guest whispered, concerning Leandra Soto’s barely there designs.
Belles-Lettres is a summery abstract work by the New York City Ballet choreographer and dancer Justin Peck, set to music by César Franck. The four men and four women of the cast, brightly costumed in turquoise and white, address the music’s swooping romanticism with dash and fervour, if not always with finesse. Peck’s choreography has the sweetness and astringent edge of a Manhattan cocktail, but these dancers serve it up like a mojito, with turning wrists, loose necks and shoulders and the ghost of a hip-shimmy in grand allegro. It’s fun, but there are moments when the musical phrasing starts to unravel. As a dancer, Acosta was so perfectly centred that he appeared to have all the time in the world. His dramatic expressiveness and classical line radiated from a place of calm and it’s this eye-of-the-storm serenity that’s missing here.
The company’s best moment, technically speaking, occurs in the middle of Goyo Montero’s Imponderable. Set to music by Owen Belton, based on songs by Silvio Rodriguez, this is an aptly titled and wholly opaque work in which the nine-strong cast spend a great deal of time either puffing at one another with smoke machines or clambering around the darkened stage with torches. There’s a point at which the clouds clear, however, and the dancers jettison the props and swing into a jazzy floor-work sequence in absolute harmony, moving and breathing as one. As a whole this is a forgettable piece, but for those two minutes Montero sets his cast on fire and it’s terrific.
Twelve, by Jorge Crecis, is a piece originally set on graduates from the Place and involves a dozen dancers throwing plastic bottles of water to one another as Vincenzo Lamagna’s driving electronic score amps up the pace. The performers dance as they throw and catch – spinning, leaping, whipping off high-velocity air turns – and the split-second timing and the ever more complex logistics of the choreography force them into a desperate precision. Inevitably, bottles are dropped, but what Crecis is aiming for is not so much perfection as an absorption in the task so total as to lead to a loss of self.
What we see, as spectators, is a team-building exercise whose intensity is somehow enhanced by its pointlessness. The piece also underpins Acosta’s determination that his company should not be a star vehicle. There are no principal dancers, only the ensemble. Everyone pulls together.
Acosta has retired from ballet, but a bittersweet duet he performs with company dancer Marta Ortega demonstrates that he’s still very much a performer. Mermaid, by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, sees Ortega floundering and weaving, clearly in an advanced state of drunkenness. Relieving her of the glass in her hand, Acosta attempts to stabilise her, but Ortega keeps folding and collapsing in his arms and, like the mermaid of the title, slipping from his grasp. This is not the first time that the couple have danced this particular dance, it seems, and it probably will not be the last. In the course of the piece, Acosta dashes off a couple of stylish aerial manoeuvres, reminding us that he’s by no means out of the game, technically speaking. It’s good to see him again and to welcome his promising young company.
• At the Lowry, Salford, from 12-14 October, then touring
