Given the virtual absence of any black British ballet scene, Ben Love had a world of expectation put on his shoulders when he was asked to create a ballet for the Push 04 season of black theatre. You can tell how heavily the burden weighed on him: what Love has tried to cram into the 45 minutes of Awakening is nothing less than the Ghanaian equivalent of a 19th-century classic.
The libretto, created in collaboration with composer Paul Gladstone Reid, is based on the Ashanti folk tale about a young man, Adom, who is so distraught after the death of his third wife that he vows to join her in the Valley of the Dead. On his journey he is assaulted by vampires and left for dead, but eventually he is granted a healing vision of his lost wives, who urge him to return to the living and take a new bride.
Love's choreography gets huge support from Reid's score, a layering of western and African colours and rhythms that keeps a strong pulse beating through the narrative. Sections where the dancing picks up on that pulse most directly - in the thrashing, twisting dance of the demon Anansi, and the showy classical solos for Adom - are arresting.
However, in much of the work you feel Love struggling under the weight of the story, with its eight scenes and prologue, and unable to focus on the inventive detail of the choreography. Much of the ballet looks disappointingly blunt and ordinary as a result: conventional gestures of emotion tacked onto straight classroom steps. And, apart from Theo Ndindwa, Sheron Wrey and the dynamically expressive Jhe Russell, Love's cast labour under the technical demands he makes of them.
What can't be underestimated, though, is the significance of the fact that this work actually made it to the stage. Black ballet needs a bedrock of trial and error as well as success to build on, and, given the audience response to Awakening, there is clearly a public waiting for it to take off.
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