As BalletBoyz’s The Talent enter their fifth year, with their first full-length production, Young Men, it’s very clear that what started out as a nursery company, for young male dancers has proudly come of age.
Iván Pérez’s war-themed piece takes its cast (11 men and two women) to the highest physical level. A battlefield vocabulary of jagged jumps and exploding turns pushes individual bodies to the edges of stamina and technique; as an ensemble, the dancers work together with a fiercely collective musicality. The addition of a commissioned orchestral score from Keaton Henson, played live, allows The Talent to assert themselves as a company of serious ambition. If only Pérez’s choreography had been a little more focused, a little more condensed, the evening could have been an unequivocal triumph.
Section by section there’s real power and inventiveness in his exploration of the physical and emotional experience of war. The parade ground drill is both brutal and beautiful, its segments of harsh, pummelling movement put together with machine-tooled precision. A shell-shocked soldier moves with splayed and sickled anguish, his suffering all the more poignant when he’s forced back into uniform to fight. In a dehumanised world Pérez makes good – and unsentimental – use of the two women, especially in the scene where one meets with her lover on the battlefront, snatching a moment of remembered intimacy before the war wrenches them apart.
There’s tenderness among the men, too, as they cradle, comfort and protect each other. Yet despite the clarity and urgency of his imagery, Pérez doesn’t work all his material sufficiently hard. Some sections feel duplicated, and the distinctions he wants to make between individual soldiers and individual stories are undermined by the gloom of the lighting and the slightly relentless dynamic of Henson’s score.
• Until 18 January. Buy tickets from theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330-333 6906.
