The Isadora Duncan dances can look dated, but the Boyz set the scene with aplomb. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The Ballet for the People gala staged by William Trevitt and Michael Nunn at the Southbank last weekend was not an entirely star studded affair, but in ways that mattered it was exemplary.
The Boyz managed to present four world premieres (by Rafael Bonachela, Will Tuckett, William Trevitt and Craig Revel Horwood). And they brokered some superb and surprising dance partnerships, including Amy Hollingsworth in duet with Oxana Panchenko, Belinda Hatley performing Ashton's Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan, and the two Ballet Boyz themselves dancing ballroom.
Most impressively though, they hit on a perfectly pitched tone for compering the event.
In deft, often genuinely funny ways, Nunn and Trevitt's mix of off-the-cuff jokes and filmed footage knitted together what was on paper a wildly disparate, even undisciplined variety of numbers. Diana and Acteon, a classic Soviet warhorse in its extremes of kitch and bravura, could have looked preposterously out of place in an evening that included Rambert and Bonachela. But getting the audience on side with Nunn's quip, "this is what we in the business call Diane from Acton", made everyone watching feel a near proprietorial fondness towards it.
Christopher Wheeldon's first dance performance in eight years (dancing in the appealing trio Riapertura) was saved from being a self-conscious, self-regarding event by candid rehearsal footage, which showed him doubled over with exhaustion in the studio and joking about all the training he had had to put in.
But Nunn and Trevitt did serious things with their introductions too. Ashton's Isadora Duncan dances are very tricky to perform cold - delicately period curios whose effects can easily look dated. By prefacing Hatley's beautifully judged performance with footage of Lynn Seymour coaching her in the studio, the Boyz spun a thread, drawing the audience into the fragile magic of the choreography.
There are many occasions, gala and non-gala, when I've felt that some equivalent of this packaging would have made all the difference. Several works in the Ballets Russes repertory, Fokine's Spectre de la Rose, Balanchine's Prodigal Son for instance, can look exposed, even vulnerable when they are performed out of context, without any introduction or historical frame.
Nunn and Trevitt's intimate, easy presentational style manages to be informative, even impassioned about dance, without audiences feeling that they are being lectured or patronised. It's an approach that other organisations could learn from.
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