David Bintley's output over the past decade has been dominated by story ballets and jazzy pastiche, but his latest work, The Seasons, shows that he is still capable of creating fluent, even brilliant pure dance. Verdi's score works almost as a blueprint for classic ballet entertainment, with its charming, skittish allegro, languid adagio, and roistering orchestration obliging choreographers to do little more than join up the dotted lines.
Many dance makers have taken up its invitation, but Bintley's Seasons, which was given its world premiere on Thursday night, insists on its own logic. While he deliberately opts for a traditional style - almost as a taunt to those who have complained about the lack of classical dancing in his recent works - Bintley works at full stretch to re-animate the familiar classroom vocabulary.
Predictable syntax is disrupted in order to ring surprises around individual steps; dizzying swerves add danger and voluptuousness. And even though the tone for each season is inevitable - the spiky glitter of Winter, the drowsy sumptuousness of Summer - Bintley writes through each section in order to create a fast and unified work.
Constantly regrouping choruses gust through the ballet like weather fronts, while the changing silvers, blues and olives of Jean-Marc Puissant's costumes provide their own chromatic calendar. What stops this ballet from being a blast of clever dance, however, is the slow-witted response of some of its dancers. Though Nao Sakuma and Chi Cao, as the lead couple in Spring, articulate the choreography with bravura relish, many of their fellows looks as if they're having a hard time keeping up. Still, the ballet may be a good opportunity for some of BRB's dancers to go back to class.
The Seasons was danced alongside Bintley's all-dancing animal hit, Still Life at the Penguin Café, and Frederick Ashton's wartime lament Dante Sonata. This revival received its London premiere with horribly apt timing, yet despite its unexpected relevance to the week's crisis in the US, the ballet will always be a period piece. The emotional urgency of Ashton's choreography seems to be inseparable from certain insurmountable naivities of expression - though admittedly some of the cast have lost the visceral intensity they brought to the ballet last year. It's a tribute to Bintley's nerve and honour, however, that he has committed himself to reviving some of these lost English ballets. The repertory would be poorer without them.
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