Royal Ballet: Dances at a Gathering/The Dream
Royal Opera House, London WC2, to 10 June
Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering (1969) is a plotless work set to piano pieces by Chopin. Tender, dreamy and shot through with a sense of long-ago love affairs, the piece acquires a different dynamic with every cast. When the Royal Ballet danced it in the 1970s, it became a signature piece, a group portrait of an unforgettable constellation of stars. When the company performs Robbins's piece today, the layers of allusion are dense. But in a good way: the new cast has new things to tell us and is not about to be crowded off the stage by ghosts.
Johan Kobborg, in fact, is rather better than Rudolf Nureyev as the enigmatic figure who opens and closes the piece. His self-deprecating humanity strikes the more resonant note and the quiet finish of his dancing has greater poignancy. There's a moment when he jumps softly back and forth en attitude, like an autumn leaf carried on the wind, which perfectly expresses the Wordsworthian notion of emotion recalled in tranquillity.
Alina Cojocaru, pliant as a tulip stem in the role that was once Antoinette Sibley's, achieves an equally elegiac shading. Cojocaru's physical articulacy is extraordinary, but there's a vulnerability here which cuts to the heart. Lauren Cuthbertson, in contrast, is flirty and effervescent, her dancing - and a couple of outrageously sustained balances - seemingly buoyed on a new sense of self. These performances, and others as fine, remind us that we are living tomorrow's memories, that the great mistake is to think that the golden age was always then, when in truth it's always now.
A pity about The Dream, which followed. Ivan Putrov was a lyrical Oberon and Roberta Marquez a pretty enough Titania, but the erotic charge between them wouldn't have powered a hair-dryer. Into the breach stepped Rupert Pennefather's Lysander and stole the show.
