English National Ballet’s new season launches with a quadruple bill that follows a loose thread through ballet’s evolution over the best part of a century. You can see the inheritance, morphing across the decades, as well as one work of rebellion.
We start in 1947, but looking back to the late 19th century, with George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, a neoclassical piece aping the Russian imperial ballet. It gently sparkles (that’s not just the diamanté necklaces) and proudly lays out its patterns and steps, academic in presentation but infused with deep love of the form, as if saying: “Here is ballet, isn’t it beautiful?!” Yet within that formality there is hidden swagger, in certain angles for example, that plants it firmly in the 20th century.
The company are impressive in quick and effortless footwork, but the leading roles go to guest stars Alice Mariani from Milan’s La Scala and Ricardo Castellanos from Norwegian National Ballet. Mariani’s weightless développés are perfection, rock solid but buttery soft. She’s a real star. There’s great orchestral playing under the baton of musical director Maria Seletskaja and especially in the main pas de deux, a sensitive solo violin in conversation with the dancers. The whole thing is like a spell, only broken on a final precarious lift.
Where ballet dancers like Mariani are illusionists, all the effort magicked away, the legendary choreographer Martha Graham, whose piece Errand into the Maze also premiered in 1947, was a realist, leaning in to gravity’s pull and the trials of dancing and being human. Graham is the fork in the road, who made dance modern, and Errand into the Maze is a stark, striking, stylised duet, a woman versus her fears, depicted as a Minotaur-type character. At first dancer Emily Suzuki seems too featherlight for this weighty role, but as the piece progresses, her movement’s focus hardens with her character’s resolve. And as she’s drawn deeper into her heroine’s journey, she pulls the audience with her.
Jump forward 45 years to a modern classic, William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman quintet from 1992, taking apart but deeply honouring the classical art. It’s a delight, from the sunset-orange leotards, to the witty physical asides – a tip of the chin, a knowing glance, a sassy shoulder – from this company who have absorbed Forsythe’s extreme stylings with ease.
All five dancers are fab, but Rhys Antoni Yeomans and Alice Bellini give extra joy. Forsythe leaves space around the dancers to really see what they’re doing, in absolute clarity and specificity; to use a current buzzword, it’s all so intentional. Like Balanchine, Forsythe is also marvelling at this dance and these dancers.
And so we arrive in the present, or 2023, with David Dawson’s Four Last Songs, set to Strauss, and sung with soaring vibrato by Madeleine Pierard. The dancers are faultless in Dawson’s gorgeous poses, tableaux, lifts and holds, in elegant and dramatic shapes (if sometimes too many outthrust arms getting in the way of the interesting stuff). But the dance feels a little anaemic – perhaps it’s the flesh-coloured barely-there costumes – somewhat hollow, at least in comparison to the three stunners that have preceded it.
At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 11 October
