For choreographers hunting out ideas for a new story ballet, Madame Butterfly sounds like the obvious steal. Not only does its story line hit all the big, danceable emotions, but it comes ready-scored with its own fabulous music. The down side, however, is that Puccini's opera is such a hard act to follow. Why would anyone bother making a ballet of Madame Butterfly when it already exists in sublime theatrical form?
So the first tribute to pay David Nixon's ballet (his first as director of Northern Ballet Theatre) is how genuinely it succeeds in putting a new spin on the opera. During the opening scene, when Butterfly's father commits suicide, and during the staging of Butterfly's own terrible death, Nixon doesn't use Puccini at all. He goes back to the music-and-theatre ritual of kabuki, and at a stroke puts the conflict between Butterfly's Japan and Pinkerton's America at the heart of the tragedy. His lovers may meet for a perfect night, but they come from such different backgrounds they never have a chance to understand each other.
During the rest of the ballet - when Nixon uses Puccini quite faithfully - he retains that sense of having touched base with a real Japan. The excellent design team (Peter Mumford and Ali Allen) brilliantly evoke the light and the location, while Nixon's choreography is full of carefully observed details of custom and demeanour. In Chiaki Nagao, as Butterfly, he may not have the strongest classical technician, but he has a dance actress capable of making us believe in Butterfly's utter vulnerability. Trapped in her passively feminine world Nagao, appears as fragile as rice paper, her delicate origami moves evoking the poetry of Butterfly's nature in contrast to the big careless Americans.
Nixon is an accomplished dramatic choreographer, and though some of his narrative dancing could do with editing, he invents brightly expressive motifs for all his other characters (performed with actorly skill as always by NBT's dancers). Where the ballet fails, however, is when the drama has to be rarefied into pure dance emotion. Nixon's vocabulary is sparked by good ideas but it isn't rich or sophisticated enough to sustain long love duets or solos. It is here that we badly miss the harmonic intensities and floating line of the operatic voice.
Yet even if we aren't made to engage fully with the central climaxes, Nixon does deliver at the end. During the final scenes, when Butterfly stands stricken at the loss of her child, then commits suicide on a blood-red stage, her grief is terrible in its austerity. This may be kabuki-Puccini fusion but it sings a final note of pure tragedy.
· Until February 23, then tours. Box office: 0113-222 6222.
