You are here: Home > What's on > Reviews > Royal Ballet, As One / Rushes - Fragments of a Lost Story / Infra, Royal Opera House

[ Bookmark this page ]

Royal Ballet, As One / Rushes - Fragments of a Lost Story / Infra, Royal Opera House

londondance.com - Graham Watts

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

Wayne McGregor's 'Infra' Royal Ballet. Photo: Bill Cooper

Reviewed: 19 February

We so often hear complaints about the lack of adventure in the Royal Ballet’s programming policy: a few one-act ballets are commissioned each year for the main stage and they are usually packaged with some hefty works by Balanchine, Ashton or MacMillan to cushion the risk.   So, hats off to Monica Mason (the RB’s Artistic Director) for courageously fast-forwarding a first major work by young company dancer, Jonathan Watkins and creating a thoroughly modern bill by following it with second runs of Kim Brandstrup’s Rushes and Wayne McGregor’s Infra, both of which premiered in 2008. This isn’t a programme for anyone who thinks ballet is just tutus, Tchaikovsky and arabesques (although there are plenty of the latter in evidence) but to show how today’s choreographers are shaping ballet for the future.  

A double whammy of praise is due to a ticketing policy that cuts the highest-priced seat to £37.50 with a reduction of around two-thirds in prices across the auditorium. It’s extraordinarily good value.
 
One could find faults with the new work by Watkins, which received the title As One literally just before the programmes went to press. The episodic subject material is drawn, in the choreographer’s own words, from ‘anonymous reflections of urban life’. This over-riding theme - ranging from house parties to the ‘shoefiti’ marking of gangland territory by knotted trainers draped over telephone lines - was disjointed, too mundane and too glib to sustain the continuing interest of a 30-minute ballet. The energy of the work was commendably strong at the beginning and end, but lost momentum and focus somewhere in mid-section.  
 
This said, there’s also much to relish, especially considering this choreographer is still a young dancer with only a few draft works, performed in much smaller spaces, yet to his credit. Watkins has a natural gift for choreography, not least in an inherent ability to patch movement eloquently into the music and to create an effective impact through his collaboration with other artists.   In particular, As One benefits from an appealing commissioned score by British composer, Graham Fitkin, which, for him, is unusually conventional in its narrative and orchestral range. The set and video designs of Simon Daw and Tim Reid took on a Hitchcockian Rear Window feel, voyeuristically overseeing a bank of apartments, from out of which stemmed the orange-clad house party (orange being the overwhelming colour of Vicki Mortimer’s costumes). 
 
An excellent opening solo for Laura Morera expanded into a vibrant group sequence, employing a panoply of separate rhythms and movement motifs. McGregor has this innate ability to create a kaleidoscope of different body patterns for several dancers within the same musical phrases, which he achieves to great effect with the six parallel duets in oblongs of light at the centre of ‘Infra’.   Watkins repeats a similar layering of independent sequences of movement for an ensemble of dancers, pulling them together into one pulsating organism for the final dénouement, where the channel-surfing, couch-potato couple (Morera and Ed Watson) become ‘as one’ with the crowded environment around them.  
 
Kim Brandstrup’s Rushes – fragments of a lost story is also brilliantly designed. The massive proscenium-filling curtain provides a wall of vertical strands, which segregates the performance.
 
Behind the curtain gives a metaphor for the grainy imagery of old film rushes, with moving lines silhouetting the dancers’ forms; the lead performers move either side of the divide, as if stepping from film into reality and back again.     
 
Where McGregor (and, it seems, now Watkins) can lose you in the crowd of their mixed rhythms for many dancers, Kim Brandstrup is a master of the duet.  Rushes is essentially a love triangle. Carlos Acosta desires the unattainable Laura Morera, but is loved in turn by the ever-so-meek Alina Cojocaru. Greatly aided by Prokofiev’s themes for a Soviet film that was never made, patched together expertly by Michael Berkeley, Brandstrup has created two immense and beautifully crafted pas de deux for Acosta with each of his leading ballerinas, and the concluding duet with Cojocaru is breathtakingly romantic.    This ballet is one that improves with every viewing.
 
I’m not convinced that the same is true for Infra, although Julian Opie’s scrolling LED screen of electronic pedestrians perambulating back and forth assures it of a certain uniqueness and spectacle.   The original cast (from November 2008) was reassembled apart from Lauren Cuthbertson, on whom the central role was made, here replaced by Sarah Lamb, who stamped her own indelible and unique mark on the piece.      Sturdy, muscular, angular, athletic dance was always in evidence but – until Lamb’s big silent scream, as a stream of uncaring, unobservant people pass by – it’s all so deliberately emotionless that the dancers and Opie’s “people” meld together in a homogenous and unarresting mass.
 
High praise, however, to the Royal Ballet for giving us a thoroughly modern programme, without concessions to the great choreographers of the past, even if it runs for only 4 more nights. Hopefully, the significant concessions on ticket prices will mean a full house, each time, and perhaps this holistic promotion of new and nearly-new ballets will continue into future seasons. I do hope so.      

Press - David Dougill, Sunday Times

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

‘I didn’t find it, or the ballet’s structure [As One], convincing as a working-out of his ambitious concept, but his handling of a large cast and confident’

Press - Jenny Gilbert, Independent on Sunday

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

‘This is an evening of two fine revivals and a world premiere, all of them made within the past two years, all of them commissioned by the Royal Ballet. Given its historic tendency to be stronger on heritage than creativity, that's a real turn-up for the company.’

Press - Debra Craine, Times

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

**** ‘…As One, a ballet blessed with a wondrous new score by Graham Fitkin and held together by the impressive way that Watkins mixes classical choreography and contemporary flavours.’

Press - Zoe Anderson, Independent

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

** ‘As One is 25-year-old Jonathan Watkins's first work for the main stage. A choreographer promoted from within the company, he creates some darting solo dances, showing off the speed and charisma of his cast, but there's a fuzzy naivety to the work as a whole.’

Press - Sarah Frater, Evening Standard

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

*** ‘The opening sequence shows promise, as does the duet for Laura Morera and Edward Watson, and musically, Watkins has made a fine choice with composer Graham Fitkin.’

Press - Judith Mackrell, Guardian

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

**** ‘The highlight is Wayne McGregor's Infra, created in 2008 and looking just as compelling second time around. It's staged with a dazzling ­simplicity: Julian Opie's neon figures track briskly across a city walkway while the ­dancers beneath evoke an inner world of ­mystery and turmoil.’

 

Press - Mark Monahan, Telegraph

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

**** ‘The movement is compellingly beautiful and danced with passion by Carlos Acosta, Morera and, most of all, Alina Cojocaru, who breaks your heart as she hobbles after the man she loves, finally holding him in a duet of exquisite tenderness and despair.’

Press - Clement Crisp, Financial Times

Performance: in rep til 4 March 2010

**** ‘Watkins, a member of the Royal Ballet making his first piece at Covent Garden, is a choreographer or, at the very least, a talent-in-waiting.’

submit review