Woolf Works – The Royal Ballet

Richter
Woolf Works

Orchestra of The Royal Opera, Covent Garden
Conductor – Koen Kessels
The Royal Ballet

Direction and Choreography – Wayne McGregor
Music – Max Richter
Designers – Ciguë, We Not I and Wayne Mcgregor
Costume Designer – Moritz Junge
Lighting Designer – Lucy Carter
Film Designer – Ravi Deepres
Sound System Designer – Chris Ekers
Make-Up Designer – Kabuki

Dancers
I Now, I Then (from Mrs Dalloway)
Virginia Woolf/Older Clarissa – Alessandra Ferri
Richard – Gary Avis
Young Clarissa – Yasmine Naghdi
Peter – William Bracewell
Sally – Francesca Hayward
Septimus – Calvin Richardson
Rezia – Anna Rose O’Sullivan
Evans – Joseph Sissens

Becomings (from Orlando)

Dancers – Liam Boswell, Harry Churches, Ashley Dean, David Donnelly, Nicol Edmonds, Benjamin Ella, Francesca Hayward, Fumi Kaneko, Mayara Magri, Marco Masciari, Anna Rose O’Sullivan, Joseph Sissens

Tuesday (from The Waves)

Dancers – Alessandra Ferri, William Bracewell, Mayara Magri

Dancers – Harris Bell, Mica Bradbury, Annette Buvoli, Leo Dixon, Kevin Emerton, Hannah Grennell, Joonhyuk Jun, Joshua Junker, James Large, Isabel Lubach, Sae Maeda, Nadia Mullova-Barley, Taisuke Nakao, Giacomo Rovero, Julia Roscoe, Mariko Sasaki, Francisco Serrano, Charlotte Tonkinson

Children – Bronwyn Cheeseman, Olympia Ede-Bray, Kai Golovniov, Ianis Graur, Henry Lennon, Zoe Reid

Soprano – Anush Hovhannisyan

Choreographer Wayne McGregor has Alessandra Ferri, the now 59-year-old ballerina, to thank for whatever success his three-act Virginia Woolf-inspired 2015 ballet enjoys.  It was Ferri then, and again now on first night of this revival, who acted as a humanising element in the notoriously cold, unemotional world this much-lauded dance-maker inhabits.  Ferri is unashamedly ‘old school’, projecting an intense stage presence imbued with feeling, fragility and meaning, her large dark eyes expressive in a way rarely seen on today’s ballet stages.  It is no coincidence, therefore, that it is the first and third sections of this trilogy which are the most successful, for it is in those that Ferri takes centre-stage.  Her presence at the work’s creation clearly demanded an approach by McGregor which differed from that used before and, alas, after which demanded emotion and even narrative.  Underpinning the whole undertaking is Max Richter’s commissioned score, slightly over-reliant perhaps on massive orchestral climaxes, but often intriguing and, in the first and last sections certainly, effectively atmospheric.

Ferri was a favoured dancer of the late, great choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, something of a muse in fact, so it is unsurprising to sense in the first section I Now, I Then, inspired by the novel Mrs Dalloway, far more than a hint of his aesthetic, even down to McGregor’s elliptical approach to narrative.  The older dancer paces the stage, remembering and participating in episodes as Woolf herself as well as a mature Clarissa, the novel’s title character, sometimes alongside her younger incarnation. Here  McGregor’s movement palette is noticeably more lyrical than is his wont as he hints at Woolf’s storyline and the ebb and flow of emotions.  However, at no time does that emotion come across as truly genuine, at no point does his choreography sing with real feeling – there is always a distance, a detachment, which ensures that the audience always observes but never participates.  Excellent performances from the dancers who work hard with what little they are given in terms of motivation and character; leading them is Ferri, whose pliancy, most notably in luxurious backbends, remains undiminished.

Ferri again acts as the magnet for the iron filings of The Royal Ballet company in Tuesday, McGregor’s third section, allegedly inspired by the novel The Waves; in reality, it is nothing of the sort, apart from the brief presence of children at one point.  The real inspiration appears to be Woolf’s suicide letter written to her husband and the fact that the author drowned herself.  The dancers, clad in slightly more seemly versions of McGregor’s favoured ‘bra and panties’, their faces covered by some form of headdress with the thinnest of gauzes, ebb and flow around Ferri in a dreamlike ensemble, the admirable William Bracewell her partner for the initial and final duet, as Ferri/Woolf moves inexorably to her death.  Ferri is spectacularly good at evoking deep melancholy (other dancers have the unenviable task of taking on the role in this revival) and one’s eyes cannot but follow her around the stage, weaving in and out of the other dancers, raised, lowered and surrounded by them.  However, as with the first section, the emotion and depth of meaning emanate from her and not from the choreography itself, which is fluent but no more.

Ferri’s absence in the central section, Becomings, apparently inspired by the novel Orlando, means that the old, ‘real’ McGregor hits you squarely in the face in a thirty-five-minute onslaught of choreographic vacuity, the stage picture literally one of smoke and lights, missing only the mirrors.  The dancers are set off on a perpetuum mobile of hyper-extensions, meaningless hand and arm semaphore and so much wasted energy to 17 often sci-fi-sounding musical variations.  Initially clad in striking Elizabethan costumes (rumoured to be fabulously expensive), they quickly shed them in whole or in part (the first performances in 2015 were even more sumptuously attired and made far better use of them).  Thereafter, the 300 years of the novel’s narrative are jettisoned.  Dancers then come and dancers go, running hither and yon, leaping and bounding, partnered movement often ugly and clumsy-looking in a riot of incoherence.  Visually, it is an indulgent piece as lasers split and criss-cross, the stage fills with smoke, the auditorium is illuminated; the lighting design quite brilliant but nothing can disguise the work’s empty heart.  The performers, led by the hyper-flexible and cool-as-a-cucumber brilliance of Fumi Kaneko, throw themselves into this farrago, but reminding one of the subtitle of The Prospect Before Us, a 1940 ballet company founder Ninette de Valois: Pity the Poor Dancers).  

This revival of Woolf Works, undeniably McGregor’s most successful three-act ballet, takes place while Petipa’s 1889 The Sleeping Beauty, the ensemble’s touchstone, is in repertoire.  Comparing the two, one cannot help but muse on the direction The Royal Ballet has taken.