Back in 2006, the premiere of Wayne McGregor’s Chroma felt like a radical incursion on to the Royal Ballet stage with its hot, howling score, its cool minimalist set and combatively off-kilter dancing. Now the ballet is regarded as a modern classic, and McGregor is the company’s resident choreographer. Yet it’s typical of the spirit he’s brought to the job that this revival of Chroma comes with an inquisitive twist: a cast that combines the Royal’s own dancers with five members of the Alvin Ailey company.
It’s a thrillingly good combination, with the Ailey dancers bringing a freer line and more openly emotional attack to McGregor’s choreography. Jamar Roberts and Jacqueline Green are outstanding, investing their performances with a haunting but unobtrusive spirituality.
Images of catastrophe inform McGregor’s newest ballet. Multiverse is in two sections, the first of which is set to Steve Reich’s 1965 score It’s Gonna Rain, which converts the fiercely apocalyptic sermon of a street preacher into loops of rhythmic sound. McGregor’s choreography responds with its own combination of formal rigour and end-of-the-world imagery. As his dancers move meticulously in and out of sync, their long, fragmenting phrases are fraught with a swiping, slicing anxiety and gestures of fear and support – imagery that resonates vividly with the images of flooding and disaster that flicker over the walls of Rashid Rana’s set. The second half expands into an alternative universe as Reich’s new score, Runner, lifts the dancers to a more serenely rational dynamic. Some sections feels diffuse, but the work closes on a note of lyrical and limpidly structured beauty.
If the evening ended there, it would be a fine double bill. But while I love the incandescent opening of McGregor’s Carbon Life, its monumental formations and mock courtliness, the work is scrappy and overlong and it somehow doesn’t rock the opera house as it should.
•In rep at the Royal Opera House, London, until 19 November. Box office: 020-7304 4000
