No matter how experimental dance gets, there remains a timeless pleasure in the marrying of movement with beautiful music. Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (previously Royal Ballet Flanders) are led by contemporary choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and they’re a progressive company (check out their lockdown series and Cherkaoui’s Mea Culpa, on Belgium’s colonial past), but their online archive shows that classical music remains an enduring inspiration.
Belgian choreographer Jeroen Verbruggen takes Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) as its muse. It’s beautiful music, but poor film recording – one fixed, wide-shot camera, noisy auditorium. Verbruggen’s not well known in the UK, so it’s still interesting to see this fairytale-ish piece. It features wili-like spirits, a la Giselle, although, rather than ethereal grace, these women (and men) bring flat-footed mischief and some galumphing. At this distance from the stage you can’t see their faces, so it’s hard to tell how comic it’s supposed to be. There are some intriguingly ambiguous relationships (a stepmother/godmother figure), but it’s difficult to read.
Cherkaoui’s Exhibition, set to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, is much better filmed, which is just as well bearing in mind its theme is looking and being looked at. Nancy Osbaldeston (a cracking British dancer, formerly of English National Ballet) sits to watch the other bodies on stage, her eyes cast from limb to limb, thoughts whirring; a mirror to what’s going on in the audience. The choreographer uses large gilt picture frames to give shape to the stage, the dancers looking out from behind them, or swallowed into them. But, unlike the subjects of paintings, Cherkaoui’s dancers are never still. His choreography is in constant, frictionless motion, tentacles of movement flowing out from a classical core. The steps aren’t gendered, but the material is more powerful when danced by the men, needing their muscle and heft to play against the soft, rubbery grace.
Bach is both an obvious and intimidating choice of music for a choreographer. It comes with inbuilt gravitas, formal rigour and rhythmic momentum, but it exposes those who can’t live up to it. Choreographer Benjamin Millepied can’t quite decide how to treat this music in his full-length Bach Studies. (Indeed, he’s made more than one version of this piece.) To the mysterious majesty of St Matthew Passion, bodies fall into religious tableaux; a mass of dancers skip and swirl to the cascading organ of Passacaglia in C minor. Sometimes Millepied reflects melody, structure or mood; sometimes none of the above. And, confusingly, he then jettisons Bach altogether for contemporary composer David Lang – and arguably the result is more powerful.
Millepied’s style is equally hard to pin down, his background rooted in classicism but his own movement more modern and matter-of-fact with influences from all over. One highlight is an engrossing female pas de deux – funny how rare that still is to see – but the best moments are solos in which the dancers connect directly with the score, and with violinist Eric Crambes on stage playing Partita No 2. Lara Fransen’s sense of phrasing suddenly transforms this into a genuinely musical dance, then the men come bounding and flying in, suspended grand jetés and entrechat sept, revealing their own deeply embedded classical and musical instincts. Here, and in all these pieces, the simplicity of that basic connection turns out to be the most rewarding thing.
• Opera Ballet Vlaanderen’s ballet and opera archive is available online.
