There’s clapping, stomping and the occasional holler – and that’s before the lights have even dimmed. “My goodness – we’ve waited for this moment,” chirps Alistair Spalding, Sadler’s Wells’ artistic director. “That’s the best sound you can ever hear.” And you can bet that over the coming weeks he’ll be hearing a lot more of it.
Multiple lockdowns may have kept English National Ballet from the stage for more than a year, but that doesn’t mean the company hasn’t been busy. Last year, with its autumn season on hold due to the looming second wave, artistic director Tamara Rojo turned to digital, commissioning a series of five dance films, each around 15 minutes long, by choreographers old and new. The results were markedly different in tone and staging; now, brought together in a new programme, they are being danced live for the first time.
The evening’s two opening works, each focused on two couples, ease us in gently. Yuri Possokhov’s sombre Senseless Kindness, based on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (think a Soviet War and Peace), is lyrical and poised – a study in atmosphere rather than any attempt at a straight retelling. The melancholic mood continues in Laid in Earth, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s take on death and the afterlife, which, though it has ditched the film version’s glistening skulls, gloopy underwater lighting and dusty floor, still retains an unsettling, otherworldly power. Precious Adams and Erina Takahashi, backed by Jeffrey Cirio and James Streeter, make easy work of Cherkaoui’s sensuous, boneless choreography, perfectly offset by Purcell’s haunting aria from Dido and Aeneas and Olga Wojciechowska’s electronic soundscapes.
Russell Maliphant never disappoints and his dazzling – in all senses of the word – Echoes features the dancemaker’s many calling cards: shimmering video projections, shadow play, throbbing sound designs and martial arts/ballet flow are all here. Less visually impressive, but (whisper it) a lot more fun are Stina Quagebeur’s Take Five Blues, a heady waltz of grand jetés and pirouettes under festoon lighting, and Arielle Smith’s joyous Jolly Folly, her witty twist on silent movies set to a Latin-infused Klazz Brothers score. “When I was in lockdown… I thought I could do something really meaningful and really change the world,” she says in a short video before the piece. “[But] it’s just meant to make people smile.”
And after the year we’ve had, who could object to that?
