The aim of BRB's current split tour is to divide its dancers between medium-sized venues in the north and south that rarely, if ever, get to see ballet. But an equally desirable spin-off from the project has been its programming. Suitably scaled repertory that doesn't routinely appear on the company's big stage has been dusted off for the regions, and the benefit is felt as much by the dancers as the audience.
David Bintley made Allegri Diversi back in 1987, when BRB was still based in Sadler's Wells and when he was still its junior choreographer. This 20-minute setting of Rossini's music has all the spendthrift invention and fizzing energy of an artist too young to care about pacing himself. Though its format is simple and its steps obediently rooted in classroom vocabulary, Bintley rewrites his own dazzling rules. Jumps and turns quiver with cross-hatched rhythms, phrases freeze into glitteringly capricious poses, speeds rev to impossible highs as this sparklingly hyper piece flickers across the stage.
Lead dancers Lei Zhao and Chi Cao grab at the chance (rare in BRB's story-heavy repertory) to show off their shiny classical technique and though several supporting dancers labour to match their pace and panache, it's good to see this young cast being challenged. None of the dancers in Dante Sonata, however, have sufficient authority to make this difficult period ballet look credible. Ashton created it in 1940 when he was dealing with the first grim implications of war and even now the emotion fuelling its symbolic battle between light and darkness makes a harrowing appeal. But the raw expressionist vocabulary with which Ashton experimented is inconsistently realised. While audiences at the time were compelled by the ballet's message, 60 years on the choreographic gaps are gapingly evident and it would take more confident, experienced dancers than BRB's cast to fill them.
Everyone, though, has an effortlessly good time in Kenneth MacMillan's glammed-up, ragtime ballet Elite Syncopations. Best of all is Michael Revie - whose wit beams from his barrowboy's grin, from the calibrated stretch of his body, and from the mix of tumbling mischief and dandy grace that he lends to MacMillan's outrageously strutting moves.
