Images Ballet Company 2019 at Lilian Baylis Theatre

Images Ballet Company at Lilian Baylis Theatre, June 19

Finding a fresh end-of-year performance repertoire for students in the final year of London Studio Centre’s classical ballet strand is fraught with compromise. While classical ballet may be central to the curriculum, the classical form in contemporary performance is subject to various challenges, from inadvertent misunderstanding to intentional mishandling. With four new works to commission for her London Studio Centre students, Images Ballet Company artistic director Jennifer Jackson is well suited to navigating the hazardous paths to its realization. Having been a soloist in the Royal Ballet and subsequently experimented in choreographing the classical form and engaged in teaching its essentials ever since, she knows how to stand her ground and is not one to follow trends. She is careful to avoid, for example, the existential threat to the classical form at her former company arising from the dis-location of the body in the choreography of Wayne McGregor. Nevertheless, she faces two issues that this end-of-year performance aims to resolve. The number of choreographers working in the classical idiom is as limited as her budget so while she can at times access the talents of some of her more experienced colleagues, she must judge the input of less well-established choreographers to make up a program that will show off the quality of her dancers to their highest standards. That Jackson succeeds in balancing these competing demands is testimony to her skill in the artistic equivalent of realpolitik.  

One aspect of the performance Jackson has developed during her tenure at London Studio Centre is the musical through-line. This year composer and percussionist Martin Pyne provides not only a virtuosic composition for Mikaela Polley’s Interplay that he performs on stage, but a witty trio with himself on a mini-piano and two dancers that is performed during the intermission as an impromptu work in itself. Pyne begins Interplay seated behind his drum kit on an empty stage, giving us a foretaste of rhythmic patterns and percussive sounds for the choreography to follow. If Polley is conversant with classical technique, the forms and underlying rhythms she has chosen for the dancers are no match for Pyne’s virtuosic playfulness. Unlike the tradition in Indian classical dance, its western counterpart lacks the training of an integrated, percussive dynamic between musicians and dancers; although the interplay is present in the communication between Pyne and the dancers, the choreographic effect falls short of its promise. At the end, the gradual dismantling of the drum kit by the dancers while Pyne continues playing undaunted is a gem of musical and virtuosic wit.

Andrew McNicol’s Mirrors is a trio, a welcome relief from the habitual form of end-of-year performances where everyone appears in all the works. McNicol trained at The Royal Ballet School where he won the Kenneth MacMillan Choreographic Competition and clearly has an understanding of classical technique. Mirrors, to the third and fourth movements from Ravel’s Miroirs for solo piano, is an impressionistic portrait of three women that never quite frames them. As long as dance is the physical expression of emotions it cannot be abstract, but if the expression is not clear the choreography will be bewildering. Mirrors has no story but its spatial and gestural intent is dissipated in this lack of clarity. 

One of the misunderstandings about classical choreography is the over dependence on the signification of its shapes; just as music exists in between notes, dance happens in between shapes. Cameron McMillan’s On Lineage relies on classically trained dancers’ shapes in movement but leaves out the dance. The choreography is perhaps too influenced by Ezio Bosso’s saccharine music (from Six Breaths and Music for Weather Elements) that uses successions of chords in a similar way. It is the kind of work, however, that can bring individual presence into relief, as is the case with Daisy Bishop, whose transformation as a performer from last year is testament to the value of Jackson’s tenure at London Studio Centre. 

It is Ashley Page’s Meadowdown that finally sets the dancers free as if the previous works had been a preparation; with a strong sense of classical technique within a contemporary form, Meadowdown soaks up the selection of music from Benjamin Britten’s lively Diversions for Piano (Left Hand) and Orchestra and translates it into a dynamically rich choreography that sets the stage dancing. Page writes that the work has been created ‘to reveal the students as they discover themselves in performance’ and that’s exactly what it does.  

San Francisco Ballet: Programme B

San Francisco Ballet, Programme B, Sadler’s Wells, September 15

By the second evening, the company is already more at ease. The programme starts with Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s Trio, to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, a wonderfully evocative minor key sextet that is reminiscent of the same composer’s Serenade for Strings, the score Balanchine used for his milestone 1934 work, Serenade. This circular relationship is completed by Tomasson’s fifteen years as a principal dancer with Balanchine’s company, and he is clearly drawn, consciously or unconsciously, into the powerful orbit of Serenade, especially in the appearance of the figure of Death in Trio’s second movement.

Christopher Dennis lights the stage and Alexander V. Nichols provides a backdrop of a silk-screened, close-up image of ancient buildings (Florence, perhaps) that picks up on the sentimental tone of the music and places the emotions somewhere in the past.

Against this backdrop, five couples waltz on to the stage in spirited form, like the music: straight out of the blocks. Tomasson brings us very much into the present moment, celebrating dance and the individual dancers, focusing especially on Vanessa Zahorian and Joan Boada, who work beautifully together in their duet and in their respective solos. Zahorian has the ability to wind up space and leave it swirling and Boada is like the torso to her limbs.

In the second, lyrical movement, we see a couple wound up in each other’s arms and a tall, slender male figure three steps behind, carving out an ominous, foreboding space: it is clear what is going to happen. Sarah Van Patten and Tiit Helimets are the two lovers caught up in an increasingly hopeless struggle to avoid the inevitable separation. Tomasson celebrates their love in a duet that is more complex than the first, but more flesh-and-blood, with a purity that suggests the couple’s bond. Vito Mazzeo as the dark figure of Death intervenes with calculated persistence, waiting his turn patiently, mercilessly, until he steals Van Patten away, his hand shading her eyes from her beloved, who is left alone with his loss.

The third and fourth movements leave Florence and its memories behind. Maria Kochetkova and Gennadi Nedvigin evidently relish every moment of the lively, earthy Russian folk rhythms and all the classical technique that Tomasson throws at them. The ensemble also gets a well-grounded workout and as the spirited fourth movement spins its shapes and rhythms, the entire cast is caught up until its fast, final, turning patterns come to a sudden end. The dancers appear to be still reeling in their bows.

The opening bars of C.F. Kip Winger’s score for Christopher Wheeldon’s Ghosts are quietly ethereal, and the sense from the figures in their Pierrot-like costumes is one of a gathering of celestial clowns at play. Wheeldon’s caterpillar forms and subtle groupings takes us unawares at first, but as in Number Nine, he finds a path through the music for his particular movement images that by the end makes you feel the path was always there. Despite the title (which is the title of Winger’s score), this is not a poltergeist ballet, but a mixing of dream and circus, fantasy and mime that envelops what Wheeldon conceived as ‘a mass gathering of souls’. Wheeldon is a master of classical form, not only in his development of classical ballet language, but in his use of space. It is more Parthenon than Seagram Building, counterbalancing groups and shapes in a natural, asymmetrical way, aided and abetted here by Mark Zappone on costumes and Mary Louise Geiger (again) on lighting. It is a creative team that forms a total harmony. Let’s not forget the contribution of the dancers, who enter into the spirit of the work beautifully. What I like about the San Francisco Ballet is that the dancers are all distinct, yet form a unity in each work without compromising that individuality. In the middle of Ghosts, on a stage lit with leaves, Wheeldon creates a beautifully expressive duet for Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith that adds a sense of reverence to the gathering of souls and the finale adds a joyous sense of fun. Makes you want to be there.

Ashley Page’s Guide to Strange Places takes its name from John Adams’ score. John Morrel’s opening image of a double yellow line down the middle of a road makes me want to overtake the head in front of me that is obscuring the view, but more importantly the road is more in character with the fast-moving opening music than with the choreography which moves fast but on foot. Paige has certainly picked up on the energy of Adams’ score, in which a broad range of percussion pounds and drives like a freight car going over a level crossing, but this leaves the dancers looking quite small in their body-tight costumes (also by Morrel), moving in different patterns that don’t quite satisfy the eye as the different instrumentation satisfies the ear. Not only that, but as the ballet goes on, I feel Paige takes a slight left turn in the road while Adams powers straight on, which is perhaps just as well, for there is a point where the percussion sounds like the theatre roof is being struck by a blunt instrument, but the classical duets continue as if nothing is amiss. According to the program notes (by Cheryl A. Ossola), Paige conceived the work as ‘an ensemble piece peppered with duets. For each one, he matched the movements, textures and tones to the dancers’ personalities and physiques.’ This translates into some great individual dancing from the four leading, colour-coded couples but it tends to keep the scale of the work intimate and inward-looking as it continues its detour to a strange place. The music has already arrived.