Kevin O’Hare has just confessed to the radical desire to programme an entire season of 21st-century productions for the Royal Ballet. No Nutcracker, not even any Ashton or MacMillan. It may be a rhetorical flourish, but two and a half years into his directorship, O’Hare has certainly been busy stocking the repertory with new works. Today, as details have been revealed of the company’s 2015-16 season, he’s announced four commissions for the main stage and one, almost new production, for the Linbury Studio.
None of these have the headline value of the 2014-15 commissions (Wayne McGregor’s yet-to-be-premiered Virginia Woolf ballet or Hofesh Shechter’s audience-polarising Untouchable, but in keeping with O’Hare’s determination to focus on company creativity, all are created by artists in-house and several come with original scores.
Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon are both creating new-act ballets, the former set to music by the contemporary Finnish composer Esa Pekka Salonen, the latter to a commissioned score by Mark-Anthony Turnage. Wheeldon’s new work is also part of a triple bill that includes two of his most popular ballets, After the Rain and In the Golden Hour, which will be the first all-Wheeldon evening at Covent Garden.
Creating his second work for the main stage, Carlos Acosta is choreographing a one-act version of Carmen, which in contrast to his gregariously exuberant Don Quixote will pare the action down to dramatic essentials and come with a specially edited arrangement of Bizet’s score. As Acosta marks the end of his 17 years as a dancer with the Royal, he will be performing the roles of Carmen’s two rival lovers, Don Jose and Escamillo.
The company’s other principal choreographer, Liam Scarlett, is also making a new work, his first three-act ballet for the company. It’s an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which, rather than vamping up the gothic horror of the narrative, will focus on the human dramas of love, fear, loneliness and longing that play out around its monster protagonist. Scarlett once again works with designer John Macfarlane and composer Lowell Liebermann, who is writing a brand new score for the piece.
That specially commissioned score may be an important detail in the success of this work. Part of the problem with Scarlett’s recent fascinating but flawed narrative ballet Sweet Violets was that his Rachmaninoff score was too cumbersome for his own storytelling needs. If Scarlett is also able to find a good dramaturge or writer with whom to collaborate on Frankenstein, we could see him creating a game changer of a ballet.
The other very promising sounding premiere is for the smaller Linbury stage. Will Tuckett’s Elizabeth isn’t quite a brand new work – it had a brief debut run at the Royal Naval College in 2013 – but this portrait of the Tudor queen, with new music by Martin Yates and a cast that includes Carlos Acosta, Zenaida Yanowsky and the actor Lindsay Duncan should be a wonderful outlet for Tuckett’s singular, storytelling genius.
As for the rest of the season, it’s a reasonably judicious balance of revivals, heritage works (a couple of Balanchines) and classics (Giselle and Nutcracker). McGregor’s Raven Girl returns – with a promise that the ballet’s weak spots will be fixed – and there are also second outings for Alistair Marriott’s Connectome, Scarlett’s Viscera and Wheeldon’s A Winters Tale. From the earlier generation of Royal Ballet choreographers comes Kenneth MacMillan’s The Invitation and a 50th-anniversary run of his Romeo and Juliet, with the promise of some very young casts (hopefully including Francesca Hayward and Matthew Ball).
After the delirious Ashton programming of the 2014-15 season, the choreographer gets slightly less stage space next year. I’m not a huge fan of Two Pigeons, but Monotones is getting a much deserved revival and the promise of seeing Rhapsody restored to its original designs (Ashton set, William Chappell costumes) will gladden the hearts of all Ashton fans.
At the Linbury, there’s only a limited season before the theatre closes down for its two-year renovation (no alternative venue has yet been proposed to take over the Royal Opera House’s commitment to new small-scale works). Still, it’s a good programme. In addition to the new Tuckett, there are visits from New Zealand Ballet (a triple bill including work by Javier de Frutos), Phoenix Dance (with a new work by Itzik Galili) and Alessandra Ferri starring with Herman Cornejo in Martha Clarke’s Chéri (based on the Colette novella).
Finally, O’Hare promises to deepen his commitment to the nurturing of young choreography, not only by opening the Royal’s annual Draft Works showcase to dancers from other companies, but also creating a carefully tailored new initiative, the young choreographer programme. The first choreographer to benefit from this will be the very promising Charlotte Edmonds, who will be closely mentored by McGregor and O’Hare, and throughout the year given opportunities both to shadow senior choreographers and create her own work.
If Edmonds’s talent is being encouraged, it is still hugely dispiriting to note that, once again, there are no female choreographers appearing on the main ballet stage. However, O’Hare has finally and publicly confirmed that this is an issue he’s working to address. There are no names confirmed for future seasons, but he promises that it won’t be long before we’ll be seeing women creating ballets for the Royal’s dancers. Given his track record so far, O’Hare does seem to be a director who delivers on promises. We’ll be watching – and hoping.
