The Royal Ballet’s Next Generation festival is a platform for youth and early career dance artists, and a natural home for New English Ballet Theatre, founded in 2010 to nurture young classical dancers, frequently through newly commissioned choreography. Their very full programme – six works, plus backstage film interviews – gives the stage to female choreographers. Ruth Brill’s Domino opens the evening, its chic tunics in Mondrian patterns and sharp Ryuichi Sakamoto score imparting a stylish modernist ambience; but both dance and dancers seem awkwardly self-conscious among the arch angles of the jigsawing choreography.
Daniela Cardim’s Nocturne, a more conventional lyric-romantic male-female duet, fits its performers more fluently as they swoop, slide and soar to the moonlit turbulence of Chopin’s piano music. But it is Morgann Runacre-Temple’sRosamunde that first gives both company and audience something to really chew on. For sound, Tom Lane sets a Schubert string quartet and his own electronic score into a shifty interplay where neither quite gains the upper hand. Hands are choreographically prominent too, placed upon elbows, thighs, flanks, or unfolding into the air – sometimes clasps, sometimes tendrils. Groups cluster, unfurl and recompose in formations that feel simultaneously mechanical, botanical and human, the dancers at once separate individuals and parts of a single composite creature.
Georgie Rose’s Solace shows plenty of promise, particularly in its opening section, a fleet, cross-cutting male trio set to Ruby Fulton’s rhythmic replays of the words “I’m sorry/not sorry”. A line of more melting, fluid female duets opens the door to more familiar neoclassical partnering and groupwork, backed by Roger Goula’s melancholic string score – but the work, though still assured, loses some of its initial focus.
Choreographed by Kristen McNally, I Can’t Dance is an oddly inhibited film to an MOR rock song by Genesis. Alternately lit and silhouetted, a cluster of hippily dressed dancers bop and sway a bit, looking slightly groovy. Excerpts from Jenna Lee’s classy Four Seasons, to Max Richter’srecomposition of Vivaldi, close the evening more confidently, giving the dancers both ample rein to shine individually as well as a secure choreographic framework to support them as a group – a fitting way to showcase the hardworking young company in this packed and very mixed programme.
• At Cheltenham music festival on 10 July; the Grange, Hampshire, on 13-14 July; and Crescent theatre, Birmingham, 3-4 August.
