In an unusually benevolent move, Birmingham Royal Ballet shares this triple bill with another company, Ballet Black. It may be an audience-building exercise for the companies, but it’s win-win for us, as the guest dancers’ contribution, Cathy Marston’s The Suit, is easily the highlight. Based on Can Themba’s 1963 short story of marital infidelity, it premiered to much acclaim last year. Marston’s talent for melding movement, character and action, trimmed of excess, is brilliantly distilled here: the story unfolds without you having to think about it; Marston makes the dancing of daily tasks (washing your face, going to work) naturalistic and uncliched; and her chorus of dancers around the central couple create texture to the choreography that is unobtrusive but essential. Then there is the way she – and the excellent leads Cira Robinson and José Alves – pull your sympathy in two directions. It’s a rich, tragic and masterful work.
If Marston’s choreography is all at the service of the plot, new piece A Brief Nostalgia, by 25-year-old Australian Jack Lister, is full of drama yet unanchored by narrative. Everything is atmospherically cinematic: the huge looming walls of the set, the dancers’ shadows cast noirishly across them; Tom Harrold’s fraught and ominous music, which could be scoring a Hitchcock thriller; and the emotional swings from desire and longing to helplessness, urgency and distress. Yet somehow, Lister only shows us what those emotions might look like, not how they feel. They’re facsimiles, filleted of meaningful motivation.
Lister intended the work to capture the weight of a person’s memories. But the elegant wrangling of bodies is very stylish, and it’s a supremely confident work for a choreographer so young.
At the other end of the experience scale is American legend Twyla Tharp. Nine Sinatra Songs, from 1982, is one of her most popular but least interesting works. Ballroom couples glide across the floor and, Tyrone Singleton and Delia Mathews’ feisty duet aside, it’s rarely more than smiling show dance. There are hints of humour, satire and swooning romance to be found, but it all too easily turns to muzak.
