Curated by Carlos, Birmingham Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells

Curated by Carlos, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells, November 4

The Birmingham Royal Ballet program at Sadler’s Wells is titled Curated by Carlos, a branding that links the identity of the company to the personality and reputation of its new artistic director, Carlos Acosta. One of the selling points of the program is a ‘new duet’ with Acosta and Alessandra Ferri, but the solipsistic branding and the promotional focus on Ferri hardly constitute Acosta’s unqualified confidence in the image of the company he now leads. Uncannily, the effect of the three works he has curated, by Spanish and Latino choreographers, also serves to downplay the individuality of his dancers and promotes instead a uniformity that effaces them. 

The company metamorphosed from the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, settling in Birmingham in 1990, a city with a burgeoning cultural life that already counted Simon Rattle and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as one of its calling cards. The term ‘levelling up’ had not been invented at the time but BRB’s change of home was part of a politically favoured redistribution of cultural assets. As an art form, ballet is independent of its home city, but the company’s presence and achievements bring the city reflected pride and prestige in the way the late Pina Bausch gave the industrial city of Wuppertal an international reputation. Acosta has brokered a more direct relationship with Birmingham by offering a dutiful gesture of appreciation to the city in the first work on his triple bill, City of a Thousand Trades co-directed by choreographer Miguel Altunaga and dramaturg Madeleine Kludje, currently the associate director of Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Its title is taken from a nineteenth century description of the city at a time when immigration and industry spurred its enormous growth. The multinational cast of BRB already acts as a proxy for immigration, but Giulia Scrimieri’s set focuses uniquely on construction as the representative industry; scaffolding poles and wheeled wooden forms become the city’s leitmotif, handled throughout with balletic grace. The co-direction effectively divides the work’s focus: Kludje celebrates the value of the city’s individuals shaped by oral histories and recorded poetry by Birmingham Poet Laureate, Casey Bailey, while Altunaga celebrates the city’s homogeneity through the value of a corps de ballet. Mathias Coppens’ score serves both approaches but cannot unite them. City of a Thousand Trades is studious in its reverence but fails to deliver the kind of spontaneous reward for which the city might be remembered.

Daniela Cardim’s Imminent, to a lush but emotionally predictable score by Paul Englishby, starts from an existential questioning about the role of the individual in a society affected by calamitous environmental and political issues. With help from dramaturg Lou Cope, Cardim has extruded these questions into an abstract balletic form with Eilis Small as the individual in a flock of classically trained dancers in tunics for whom the answer to everything is either an arabesque or a pirouette. Only April Dalton’s set — a backdrop of white papier-mâché cliffs inset with an incongruous hinged door — gives any kind of direction to the work: a choice for the dancers of either passing through the open door into the mysterious light of the unknown or remaining in the comfort of unknowing. Some do, some don’t. It’s all a bit banal and underwhelming, questioning less the role of the individual conscience in society than the relationship between choreographer and dramaturg. 

Goyo Montero’s Chacona is evidently designed to be the ballast that will anchor the entire program. Choreographed to a full-blooded transcription by Ferruccio Busoni of Bach’s Chorale Prelude No. 3 and to three instrumental interpretations of the chaconne from Bach’s Partita No.2 in D Minor, Montero’s opening geometric corridor of dark-clad bodies sculpted in light has the brooding suggestion of a clandestine obsession. Imposed on the rectangular geometry of the dancers is a triangle with musicians at each apex: pianist Jonathan Higgins and a Steinway grand at the back with Robert Gibbs on violin and Tom Ellis on classical guitar on either side. Into this muscular environment Montero introduces the lithe Alessandra Ferri for a brief appearance with Acosta as her partner but they have no influence on the complex choreographic monolith that engulfs them; Ferri’s appearance and artistry are subsumed into the shadowy darkness of the stage. No sooner do they appear than we start to wonder where she and Acosta have gone; this is the reality of the much-hyped duet, a short interpolation that Montero has deftly concealed within his original construction. While it leaves the choreography intact the company recedes into its oppressive, sometimes brutal embrace. 

Carlos Acosta, A Celebration of Thirty Years In Dance

Carlos Acosta: A Celebration of Thirty Years in Dance, Royal Albert Hall, October 2

Carlos Acosta with Acosta Danza (photo: Manuel Vasson)

There’s a lot to celebrate in what Carlos Acosta has to show for his 30 years in dance, not least his ploughing of the benefits he received as a young dancer back into the rich soil of Cuba in the form of a company, Acosta Danza, and a dance academy in Havana that opened last year. For those who want to see Acosta himself in action he is still in fine and seemingly effortless form and worth watching. It is the package in which this 30-year celebration is presented at the Royal Albert Hall that leaves something to be desired and a few questions. The celebration has the feel of a public relations event in the form of a performance rather than the other way round; Acosta is essentially a guest artist in his own company and is the focus of the evening.

One of the valuable decisions is to present Acosta Danza on its own merits in Alrededor no hay nada with choreography by Goyo Montero to recorded poems by Joaquin Sabina and Vinicius de Moraes. Although there is no printed translation of the poems, their rhythmic structure and the sound of the syllables are beautifully embodied in the choreography and in the elegant, pliant athleticism of the dancers. Each poem is treated as a separate movement within the whole, generating cohesive, often humorous choreographic miniatures in which the contrasts of everyday life in Havana find their expression; they seem to breathe with the sound and colour, exuberance and violence, joy and sadness of the city.

The evening opens with a Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui duet, Mermaid, to a score by Cherkaoui and Woojae Park played live on bells, geomungo and piano. The association of Acosta and Cherkaoui is not immediately evident; there is a connection through the Sadler’s Wells roster of associates but watching Acosta dance this duet is to sense a fish out of water, whereas the fluid Marta Ortega as the mermaid, even on pointe, is much more within her realm.

The final work on the first part of the program is Christopher Bruce’s Rooster choreographed on iconic songs of the Rolling Stones. Bruce writes, ‘In my teens I lived with these songs. I have taken eight tracks and linked them with themes present in the lyrics.’ As with Alrededor no hay nada, there are no printed lyrics but the punchy rhythms and inspired instrumentation (this was before the death of Brian Jones) are all you need to conjure up the cocky chauvinism of the greased-back rockers who strut their stuff in front of an acquiescent female gaze. And yet in this performance, with Acosta as chief rooster, something has got lost in translation. It starts with Tina MacHugh’s lighting whose original intensity and colour seems to have been filtered through a kind of purple haze which also affects the appearance of Marian Bruce’s costumes: they lose their punch. And for a choreographic treatment that bounces off the walls, there aren’t any walls to bounce off in the airy space of the Royal Albert Hall stage so the energy dissipates. That leaves the best efforts of the dancers to rescue Rooster but here again the accuracy of Bruce’s playful, extrovert gestures and attitudes is little more than an approximation; the men are cocks but not cocky and even the charisma of Acosta becomes an apology for self-assertion. Rooster deserves better.

The second half of the program is the complete Carmen as conceived and choreographed by Acosta to the arrangement by Rodion Shchedrin of Bizet’s score with additional music by Martin Yates. The orchestra under the baton of Paul Murphy is perched high above and to the left of the stage. Although the choreography is uneven in its disparate influences, it suits the company well. With Laura Rodriguez as Carmen and Javier Rojas as Don José the narrative line never falters and Acosta’s presence as Escamillio does not overshadow them. Rodriguez moulds her prodigious technique to express the willfulness, seduction and scorn in the choreography, while Rojas maintains a youthful naivety whose burgeoning passion is drawn to his murderous solution by forces he cannot control. Acosta’s suave Escamillio borrows more from the Royal Ballet than from the bullring, but in Carlos Luis Blanco as the embodiment of a bull the raw, earthy masculinity of Carmen’s macho narrative is complete. In its strong, percussive ensemble work and convincing characters Carmen gives the company a chance to cut their technical teeth on a dramatic narrative, a process Acosta can pass on to his dancers with the authority of experience. That is worth celebrating.