Images Ballet Company 2018 at Lilian Baylis Studio

Images Ballet Company, Year-End Performance, Lilian Baylis Studio, June 17

Eleonora Gatti, Demi Aldred, Anna Heery, Shannon Higgins, Hannah Orton (photo: Johan Persson)

It’s that time of year when dance institutions like London Studio Centre present end-of-year performances to showcase the hard work of both staff and students over the year and particularly over the last three months of preparation. Ultimately it’s the students who take off on the stage while teachers and staff remain on the ground to prepare for the next flight. In the case of London Studio Centre, whose intake of dance students over 3 years of training in multiple disciplines is around 360, there are just five this year specializing in classical ballet. With the quality of training and opportunities artistic director Jennifer Jackson brings to these third-year students and considering classical ballet technique is the underpinning of so many contemporary dance companies, this number is surprisingly and disproportionally small. To make up the numbers for these performances Jackson has recruited three second-year students (Daisy Bishop, Maria Bruguet and Esme Calcutt) to join the graduate year of Demi Aldred, Eleonora Gatti, Anna Heery, Shannon Higgins and Hannah Orton.

Images Ballet Company was originally founded in 1991 under the artistic directorship of former Royal Ballet principal Margaret Barbieri. That lineage of the Royal Ballet continues through Jackson and, in these performances, through choreographers Érico Montes and Hubert Essakow who were both dancers in the company (Montes also trained at London Studio Centre). Bim Malcomson’s witty, fresh approach and Morgann Runacre-Temple’s blend of dance and theatre balances the classical work with a variety of styles these dancers can expect as they pursue professional careers.

It is not so much the works produced in these year-end performances as the effect they produce on the dancers; they are the ones being assessed for their potential even if the choreographers benefit from the opportunity to create new works. Inevitably each dancer will bring to the stage a quality or characteristic that will define her in some way from the others; ideally over the four works something unique will emerge in each dancer. The responsibility for its achievement is on the shoulders not only of Jackson and her choreographers but of the dancers themselves.

I admire Jackson’s insistence on live music where possible; if she doesn’t have an orchestra she has at least Elliott Perks and Tom Ellis. They arranged Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder for viola and guitar which they play on stage for Essakow’s Cut Out and they perform for the audience in between works. It’s a shame they cannot be used more as the sound and texture of live music brings out the quality of dance steps while the dynamics of music and choreography can have a living conversation. Indeed, Essakow intended the four movements of Schumann’s music to form a series of choreographic conversations and in Aldred he has an artist who is eloquent. She has a strong technique, steely but soft pointe work and above all eyes and gesture that communicate not only with the music but with the audience. It is as if she is at a gathering with four friends; they chat together but the music draws her away to converse with her inspiration, the unseen Schumann. Essakow creates a sense of intimate space and Louie Whitemore’s black brocade bodices suggest a nineteenth century period style.

If Aldred takes her place in the room, Heery is noticeable by her natural reticence; she has the lyricism of a dreamer. In Montes’ Sonata in Colour to the music of Florence Price, Heery is like a lost girl remembering; Montes invests his choreography with an ethereal sense that reaches back to classical ballet but finds in Heery an interpreter whose quality of gesture is very much in the present.

Malcomson takes an idiosyncratic, somewhat irreverent approach to classical dance that brings out the idiosyncracies and irreverence of the entire cast. Her Red Queen Brouhaha references Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland and uses some of Joby Talbot’s score for Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet of the same name. There are lots of jam tarts, a croquet waltz, outraged screams and Orton coming into her own as Alice looking through both ends of an imaginary looking glass. Gatti and Higgins both find their comic form here as Malcomson proves her value as a catalyst in bringing diverse personalities together in a riotous whole.

Runacre-Temple’s Mozart’s Women: The Kingdom of Back uses extracts of Mozart’s music and recorded readings of his letters to his sister Nanneral (Aldred), his muse Aloysia Weber (Heery) and her sister, Constanze (Gatti), who became Mozart’s wife. It’s a piece that cries out for powdered wigs and voluminous dresses to evoke the texture of these women and to connect their play of gesture to the music but in its current form, under Andrew Ellis’s islands of light, it is a refined miniature that pays equal tribute to the women portrayed and to those who portray them.

The evening ends as it began with the music of Schumann, the two final movements of Essakow’s Cut Out, one for the ensemble and one that provides a parting solo for Heery.