The suffering of the young men who fought in the first world war has inspired numerous dance works. Perhaps most memorably Gloria, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1980 ballet to the music of Poulenc, and Crystal Pite’s Lost Action (2006). In 2014 English National Ballet presented Lest We Forget, a programme marking the centenary of the conflict, and including specially commissioned works by Liam Scarlett, Russell Maliphant and Akram Khan.
It goes without saying that this is a subject that should not be tackled lightly. Dance is an eloquent medium for the exploration of states of mind, but stray too close to figurative images of war, and you risk bathos. Any work touching on real human tragedy must be interrogated with the utmost rigour. Does it bring a new understanding of the agony of conflict, and of events which, to this day, continue to resound through people’s lives? Or is it merely a restatement of well-worn pieties, seeking profundity by association?
BalletBoyz’s The Talent, the company launched in 2010 by former Royal Ballet dancers Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, advances into this hazardous territory without apparent trepidation. For most of its existence the company has been all male, and in the early days its performances, if not overtly sold as such, tended towards cheerful beefcake display. Commissions from choreographers such as Scarlett, Maliphant and Christopher Wheeldon have leveraged the ensemble into the art-dance bracket, but a certain ambiguity lingers.
This is evident in Young Men, created by the Spanish choreographer and former Nederlands Dans Theater performer Iván Pérez. At 80 minutes the piece, set to a hurtling score by Keaton Henson, is longer than any of the works cited above. Pérez knows how to fill a stage with dancers, sending them on in rolling waves and well-drilled diagonals to the thunderous swirl of Henson’s cellos, before collapsing them in canon, like dominoes. Trevitt and Nunn have produced a very likable cohort of performers, with a real esprit de corps. The dancers’ belief in the BalletBoyz project is evident, their mutual trust and supportiveness palpable. And they look great.
But for all its length, and the authority of Henson’s score, Young Men rarely offers more than a glancing examination of the issues it purports to address. The strongest section, perhaps based on Siegfried Sassoon’s description of life at the Craiglockhart war hospital, presents Andrea Carrucciu as a shell-shocked soldier. To an ominous, shuddering soundtrack, as a second figure attempts to sooth him, Carrucciu twists himself in convulsive knots, unable to escape the endlessly replaying spool of his memories.
But long tracts of choreography devote themselves to specious and repetitive portrayals of victimhood. There are far too many sorrowful cradlings, sentimental pietàs and emptily anguished duets. The moment of death, endlessly reprised, is represented as a willowy, aestheticised folding to the stage. The brutal truth is that for all his evident sincerity of purpose, Pérez has bitten off more than he can chew. Unlike MacMillan or Pite, he simply doesn’t have the choreographic language to deal with the resounding horror of his subject. Condensed, there is a respectable 35-minute piece here. The shell-shock section, distanced as it is from the physical event of war, is evidence of a fine, compassionate vision. But, like many before them, Pérez and the BalletBoyz have expanded a promising shorter work to fit the conventional “full-length” template, and in doing so have fatally diluted their material.
It may be that what they are attempting is impossible. That the experience of those young men a century ago is unimaginable. But the danger of aestheticising it – of turning battle into synchronised group gymnastics and making death painlessly beautiful, rather than, as the poet Wilfred Owen wrote, a matter of blood gargling from “froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer” – is that you contribute to what Owen called “the old lie” of noble and romantic sacrifice. BalletBoyz and the Talent mean well, but on this occasion good intentions are not quite enough.
• The final performance of Young Men at Sadler’s Wells is at 4pm today
