At their best, galas can provide a snappy overview of the international dance scene, and on paper that was what the Benois awards seemed to offer. Its showcase of recent award winners not only included a scattering of seriously big names, but featured dancers and choreographers rarely seen on the British stage.
Yet the evening was almost the worst of its type I've ever seen. Elisabeth Platel disastrously opted to perform a pas de deux from John Neumeier's Sylvia. Neumeier's self-consciously gauche steps stripped Platel of all her Parisian artistry as she manoeuvred doggedly through its stilted unmusical conceits and suffered Yann Saiz to hoist her through an unwieldy parade of lifts.
Gregor Seyffert also has a big talent, but unluckily he has a father, Dieter, who choreographed both of his solos. Lunchbreak was a mildly amusing parody about a businessman with ballerina ambitions and a blow-up swan in his briefcase. Clown of God, though, was a portrait of the mad genius Nijinsky, that indulged in such eye-rolling cliches and lurid sensationalising that Seyffert was virtually unwatcheable.
Sofiane Sylve looked tensile and mysterious in David Dawson's The Grey Area while Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon flared a private intensity in their own Sigue. But the gala format didn't suit either work and the audience were clearly restive for fireworks. In the end only Ulyana Lopatkina delivered, in Fokine's Dying Swan. As waves of lyricism and exquisite agony convulsed her delicate limbs, the audience felt the frisson of a legend - and went gratefully wild.
