The Royal Ballet ‘Perspectives’

Tchaikovsky / Britten / Stevens 

Serenade

Against the Tide

Everywhere we Go

Tchaikovsky / Britten / Stevens
The Royal Ballet

‘Perspectives’

Orchestra of The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Conductor – Martin Georgiev

Serenade
Dancers –
Marianela Nuñez, Claire Calvert, Sae Maeda, Matthew Ball, Joonhyuk Jun

Mica Bradbury, Hannah Grennell, Chisato Katsura, Amelia Townsend

Madison Bailey, Olivia Findlay, Bomin Kim, Isabel Lubach, Nadia Mullova-Barley, Julia Roscoe, Sumina S. Sasaki, Ella Newton Severgnini, Charlotte Tonkinson, Marianna Tsembenhoi, Lara Turk, Yu Hang, Ginevra Zambon, Denilson Almeida, Luc Foskett, Harrison Lee, Aiden O’Brien

George Balanchine – Choreography
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Serenade for Strings) – Music
Karinska – Costume Design
John B. Read – Lighting Design 

Against the Tide
Dancers –
William Bracewell, Matthew Ball, Nicol Edmonds, Melissa Hamilton

Denilson Almeida, Luc Foskett, Harrison Lee, Caspar Lench, Aiden O’Brien

Violin solo – Vasko Vassilev

Cathy Marston – Choreography
Benjamin Britten (Violin Concerto) – Music
Chloe Lamford – Set
Annemarie Woods – Costumes
Fabiana Piccioli – Lighting

Everywhere we Go
Dancers –
Sae Maeda, Marianela Nuñez, Mayara Magri, Daichi Ikarashi, Reece Clarke, Luca Acri
Viola Pantuso

Mica Bradbury, Julia Roscoe, Amelia Townsend, Téo Dubreuil, Joshua Junker, Taisuke Nakao

Madison Bailey, Olivia Findlay, Nadia Mullova-Barley, Sumina S. Sasaki, Charlotte Tonkinson, Marianna Tsembenhoi, Denilson Almeida, Martin Diaz, Emile Gooding, Brayden Gallucci, Caspar Lench, Alejandro Muñoz

Justin Peck – Choreography
Sufjan Stevens – Music
Karl Jensen – Set Design
Janie Taylor – Costume Design
Brandon Stirling Baker- Lighting Design

Sandwiched between a delightful revival of Frederick Ashton’s perfectly-conceived La Fille mal gardée and the Christmas sugar rush of The Nutcracker, a bizarrely formed triple bill from The Royal Ballet, the logic of its construction, frankly, unfathomable: George Balanchine’s masterful first work in the New World, Serenade (1934), Against the Tide, a new commission from British choreographer Cathy Martson and Everywhere we Go, a 2014 work made for New York City Ballet by their now Resident Choreographer Justin Peck. It makes for an overlong and underwhelming evening.

Not that Serenade is in any way underwhelming – it remains a limpid, moonlit abstract ballet of true beauty, a loving response to Tchaikovsky’s lush Serenade for Strings with the third and fourth movements transposed, and is a choreographic masterpiece of the twentieth century. It was superbly revived last season as part of a Balanchine triple bill and now returns undimmed to open this strange evening. Marianela Nuñez led a performance of unforced lyricism, her own dancing a wonder of technical surety and melting upper body, and she was partnered with princely aplomb by Matthew Ball, one of the company’s most interesting and accomplished male dancers. Sae Maeda, a rising company star, brought real momentum to her dancing which exhibits the welcome quality of abandon, while the corps de ballet were impressive with their shared musicality and assurance in the choreography. Martin Georgiev guided the house orchestra through a spirited rendition of the score. Alas, two of the five main dancers were less satisfying, one approaching the choreography with clenched jaw determination and her partner seemingly woefully under-rehearsed and generally uncomprehending of his purpose on the stage. A blemish on what was, nevertheless, a performance which, in the round, showed the company on fine form.

That Cathy Marston continues to be deemed a happy fit with The Royal Ballet and, more importantly, its large stage, is mystifying; she is a miniaturist who works successfully in considerable detail but is unsuited to filling a large space. The Cellist (2020) was, frankly, an overlong, indulgent dip into the life of Jacqueline du Pré which saw company dancers representing not only a cello but also an armchair, a record player and a lamp stand; thankfully no inanimate objects in Against the Tide, set to Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, masterfully played by Principal Guest Concert Master Vasko Vassilev. Marston had, apparently, a narrative in mind when creating this new work, one which she did not fully share even with her dancers, so that for 35 minutes the audience has precisely no idea what is going on. It is, on the face of it, an abstract work, but the pull of the narrative undercurrent is so strong that one continually seeks to understand who these people are and why they do what they do. Marston gives nothing away, so the frustration mounts. The stage certainly looks good, with a sea wall structure rising into the air from one side of the stage to create a stone arch at the other through which dancers emerge. Costumes are ho-hum, middle of the last century-ish, with one character – unnamed, of course – in an ill-fitting uniform of sorts. The central character seems to be a loner, a young man wasting time on the beach. Is he supposed to represent Britten himself? Who knows. Another young man ambles on and the two establish a sort of relationship – Allies? Friends? Lovers?… again, who knows. A lone woman emerges and dances with our ‘hero’ – His mother? A spirit? The Ghost of Christmas past? Who knows. Our ‘hero’ is finally left alone and, of course, climbs onto the stone arch which had been conceived for that final purpose all along – Britten ascending into musical Parnassus? A young man leaving his past walking off into his future? Who knows and, frankly, who cares. 

As the young man and his ‘friend’, the company’s two finest dance-actors, William Bracewell and Matthew Ball, who are tireless in their efforts to convey something. Their artistry and dedication are wasted given that Marston’s choreography is pedestrian, predictable and repetitive. Faced with the challenge of creating male duets, she has fallen back on the acrobatic approach – the men roll over each other or lift each other up, often upside-down, again and again, they execute forward rolls on the ground, jut out their limbs, but there is no meaning and certainly no intimacy; it is muscular stuff which conveys precisely nothing. One moment when the two sit facing away from each other and lean back to back provides a hint of what the choreographer could have explored: Bracewell tilts his head back to rest onto Ball’s shoulder and Ball toys with a lock of his hair; more is said in that moment of intimacy than in all the heavings and luggings of the rest of the ballet. Quite who Nicol Edmonds’ uniformed older man and his gaggle of youngsters are is anyone’s guess – they enter at intervals, engage in some jumping around, making emphatic arm gestures, and then leave. Melissa Hamilton is always at her finest in contemporary work, and she does not disappoint as the sole female in the work; she is seen by Bracewell alone, so one can surmise that she is a figure from his past, maybe his mother, maybe his elder sister, but her movements too have little effect.

Against the Tide fails on two major counts. Firstly, the inescapable sense that all this means something makes the deeply opaque nature of Marston’s treatment intensely frustrating. That in itself does not condemn the work; after all, Kenneth MacMillan’s last great ballet, The Judas Tree, is equally evasive in terms of making the choreographer’s narrative clear to the audience. What sinks this piece is the paucity of invention in the movements and steps; they are inexpressive and repetitious and make the work something of a bore.

Like the Royal, New York City Ballet has been on a search for the next great company choreographer after having enjoyed the work of its first two. In London we still seek a successor to Ashton and MacMillan; in New York, they want one to Balanchine and Robbins. On the evidence of his first work to enter the Royal Ballet repertoire, Justin Peck is not that person. Everywhere we Go is certainly American in feel and approach, tapping readily into a dance culture which is heavily influenced by the stages of Broadway and the sound stages of Hollywood. Certainly, there is an overriding sense of levity in this 2014 work which, allied to the filmic jauntiness of the commissioned score Sufjan Stevens, is akin to a forty-minute chorus line rictus smile. The women are dressed in a nautical wear with white striped tops, the men, more sober, although why the costume designer has selected a fabric for them which leaves them with unsightly dark sweat patches is bizarre. 

Whimsy is perhaps the best word to describe it overall, which makes the ballet a seriously long haul, nine sections which last for as long as they last. 25 dancers come and go, duos and groupings emerging from the ensemble, large pizza slices of movement sometimes criss-crossing the stage. Peck employs the ‘more is more’ approach when it comes to populating his stage, so it often feels like a choreographic pile-up as dancers skitter hither and yon, making one long for Balanchine’s scenic clarity. Choreographically, it can be best summed up as ‘smudged classicism’, a spendthrift use of the technique of ballet which, in the great American tradition, is liberally sprinkled with everyday movements – I find knowing looks to the audience, intentionally comic poses and jokey groupings utterly unamusing, especially when the basic movement palette is so uninspiring. Several of the company’s finest dancers are set off on choreographic combinations which are neither inventive nor beautiful; when artists of the standing of Nuñez and Reece Clark are brought together in pas de deux of mind-numbing simplicity and unattractiveness, you know something is really amiss. Equally, when the ninth section consists merely of reprises from the previous eight, you know Peck has run out of ideas. The choreographic confusion spreads to the dancers who engage in everything asked of them with great gusto if not much balletic precision.  That Everywhere we Go was deemed a suitable acquisition is to be challenged. The Royal Ballet management seems currently to be in the thrall of Americana; with Christopher Wheeldon in a lengthy and worrying sub-Broadway career phase which has brought us a series of choreographic turkeys from Madame X and Like Water for Chocolate on to An American in Paris, one would have thought that London did not need any more of it. On the evidence of this work, Peck brings nothing to the company; if they want ‘American’, they could do far worse than turn to William Forsythe who eschews whimsy and cuteness in favour of thrilling, daring and demanding classical ballet movement through a contemporary lens.