The Royal Ballet’s latest mixed bill, Perspectives, trumpets two works new to the repertoire, one a world premiere, the other an American import. Whatever their success, both invigorate the dancers in exciting and entirely different ways.
The British choreographer Cathy Marston, now based in Zurich, gave Covent Garden a hit in 2020 with The Cellist, her ballet about Jacqueline du Pré. Now she’s back with Against the Tide, an obscure creation inspired by Benjamin Britten’s glorious Violin Concerto. The ballet has no explicit narrative, although the circumstances of the music’s composition — written in 1939 on the brink of the Second World War — are clearly present in a dance all about men.
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Against the Tide reads like a memory play in which a lone man — William Bracewell leading the first cast — looks back at his life in the moments before his death, perhaps on the battlefield (or perhaps not). Is everyone else on the dark stage — dominated by Chloe Lamford’s giant, rocky staircase-cliff — dead? Certainly the achingly seductive duets for Bracewell and Matthew Ball suggest a lover now departed, while the man’s encounters with Melissa Hamilton, as a consoling mother figure, are fragmentary and elusive. Even the soldiers, led by Nicol Edmonds, feel both past and present.
Justin Peck’s Everywhere We Go
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Opening night performances were physically fluid and dramatically intriguing, like Marston’s choreography, but the ballet is a frustrating enigma. No doubt about the music, though — it’s stunning, especially with Vasko Vassilev as the solo violinist mining its tortured intimacy and the conductor Martin Georgiev drawing out its grandeur from the orchestra.
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Justin Peck’s Everywhere We Go (2014) comes from New York and is driven by that city’s famous energy and bright lights. Sufjan Stevens’s surging orchestral score is built for dance — it’s a burble of colourful rhythms — but it’s too long (40 minutes) and Peck’s imagination runs out before the end. Still, there’s a real sense of community about the ballet and it’s fun watching two dozen happy dancers ride Peck’s joyous, supercharged choreography which takes the classical language and sets it free to play — fast and slow — against a backdrop of shifting geometric shapes. There were vibrant performances all round, but especially from a dynamic Sae Maeda and Reece Clarke.
Melissa Hamilton and William Bracewell in Against the Tide
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The programme also includes a revival of George Balanchine’s 1935 female-centric Serenade, a masterpiece of dazzling choreographic architecture and romantic mystery. The dance’s engagement with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings is ecstatic, something a gorgeous Fumi Kaneko, making an impressive debut in the lead female role, well understood.
165min
Royal Opera House, London, to Dec 2, rbo.org.uk
★★★★☆
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