Last year during lockdown, over Zoom, William Forsythe choreographed The Barre Project (Blake Works II) on a quartet of dancers in New York: Tyler Peck, Lex Ishimoto, Brooklyn Mack and Roman Mejia. “Ballet is a great platform for compositional thinking,” he remarked at the time. “It’s a way of hearing, and so what you’re basically demonstrating is how you listen.” The Barre Project revealed a choreographer whose legendary familiarity with classical ballet technique allows him to take it in directions that ring true to its source while extrapolating its technical and spatial possibilities, just as Balanchine had done at New York City Ballet. In his way of working and in the choreography itself, Forsythe demonstrated the excitement of a precocious, hyper-active child at play: creating not to indulge an inherent aesthetic sensibility so much as to respond instinctually to James Blake’s music within given physical parameters. If anyone stood out it was Peck, but all four were clearly inspired by what Forsythe had brought out of them; in order to make sense of the choreography, they performed with the same excitement and impulsion that Forsythe brought to the work.
For English National Ballet (ENB)’s recent The Forsythe Evening at Sadler’s Wells, both works on the program — Blake Works I and Playlist (EP) — are conceived with a broader brush than The Barre Project (Blake Works II) — more orchestral than chamber — and neither was fully conceived and choreographed on the company. Blake Works I, to seven tracks from James Blake’s album The Colour in Anything, was first created on the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016 and has been staged for ENB by Stefanie Arndt and Ayman Harper, while Playlist (EP), to the beats of neo-soul and house music, and staged for ENB by Amy Raymond and Noah Gelber, is an enhanced version of Playlist (Track 1,2) that Forsythe had set on the male dancers of ENB in 2018 and subsequently extended for Boston Ballet a year later. There is always going to be an inherent challenge in passing on a choreographer’s initial motivation to dancers on whom the choreography was not conceived, especially to dancers who are not familiar with his way of working. In an interview in the program with Sarah Crompton, Forsythe describes these two abstract works as dancing for the pure pleasure of dancing, a ‘celebration’.
But there’s a subtle disconnect between the celebratory feeling of the choreography and the performance of the choreography by the dancers: their celebration — with one or two exceptions — seems to get lost in the satisfaction of accomplishing the steps. If choreography is a way of hearing, ENB’s dancers are hearing something different not only from each other but from what the choreography is manifestly singing. At the final bows, Forsythe improvised a brief impromptu boogie by way of instigating the encore; there was so much celebration in his movement that it came across as pure spirit in a musical body, and it stood out from the rest of the evening because it revealed the very ingredient that had been lacking.
This is one of the last programs, if not the last, ENB will be dancing before artistic director, Tamara Rojo, leaves for San Francisco Ballet along with some of her current dancers. Rojo has done so much for the company’s reputation in terms of getting works by choreographers like Pina Bausch, Jiri Kylian, Mats Ek and Forsythe, getting Akram Khan to choreograph a Giselle, pulling together a program by female choreographers and most recently reviving Raymonda. Not to mention attracting the sponsorship for and overseeing the move to their new home at the Mulryan Centre for Dance. This is the kind of artistic acuity that has reframed ENB’s image, and if there is a rivalry between ENB and Rojo’s former company, the Royal Ballet, it is not hard to see that the former has constantly outclassed the latter in its string of achievements. In all areas, perhaps, but one: the multiple publicity triumphs Rojo has accomplished seem to have overshadowed the company’s dancers. While technique is still at a high level — there is nothing wrong with the technical ability of the company under its swathe of ballet masters — there are traces of cloud hanging over the company. The news of Rojo’s departure may be recent, but the cloud — despite a counterpart of sunny spells — has been part of the climate for some time.
Even after the performance of The Forsythe Evening has finished and the memory allowed to settle, there is not much left of the evening apart from the knowledge of having seen Forsythe’s work in the absence of its full realization.
Akram Khan created his transposition of Giselle for English National Ballet in 2016; this is its second return to a London stage since then. Giselle, as Jane Pritchard writes in a program essay, is the earliest (1841) of the ‘canon of ballets’ and one of the cornerstones of the classical repertoire. Set in an ‘idealised, picturesque arcadia’ it ‘tapped into the fashion for Romanticism with its emphasis on exoticism, irrationality, other worldliness and danger’. Khan and his dramaturg Ruth Little have updated the context of the ballet while allowing its historical timeframe to remain vague, somewhere in a colonial economic era with Giselle as a redundant garment worker in a closed factory (an ‘outcast’) and Albrecht as the scion of an overseer family (a ‘landlord’). Albrecht’s duplicity, Giselle’s naivety and Hilarion’s jealousy still drive the narrative, but Khan’s appropriation of the romantic ballet seems to get in the way of his overarching theme of migrant labour, landing his cast in a narrative no-man’s land undermined by a contrived dramaturgy and a choreographic language that fails to take advantage of the expressive strengths of either Khan’s kathak or ENB’s classical technique.
As Khan’s dramaturg, Little is aware of the connections and correspondences at work in this creation and coherently disentangles the various references in a program essay. But on stage, where it counts, the coherence is unresolved. The first act follows the broad sweep of the original scenario but conjoins the love story with social inequality. The stage is divided horizontally by Tim Yip’s monumental, moveable wall that hinges like an overhead garage door, dividing a small number of landlords on one side from the outcasts on the other. The wall is not so much a background as an overpowering metaphor of uncompromising power and social separation that underlies Khan’s vision; the attempt to fit this vision to the story of Giselle becomes especially problematic in the tenuous link between the two acts. Little writes that the second act is set in a ‘ghost’ factory (which looks uncannily like the first act) where the Wilis have become ‘the female migrant workers of Act 1 [who] have laboured, and too many have died, victims not of betrayal in love, but of industrial accidents…’ The original Wilis, having died of broken hearts, were a natural advocacy group for Giselle who had suffered a similar fate. In Khan/Little’s version the Wilis’ revenge is aimed at the callous manipulation of the owner class rather than against dissembling men; love has been transposed — and sidelined — by socio-political sanctions.
Khan’s choreographic vision is rooted in the collective and it is in the corps de ballet that his imagery is most successful, coinciding at times with Vincezo Lamagna’s high-decibel score to suggest repetitive, mechanical gestures and formations of migrant factory workers, while the feral quality of the company scampering on all fours across the stage signals the breakdown of humanity under brutal subjugation. Even Giselle’s madness and death at the end of Act 1 are overshadowed by the seething circle of outcasts who mill around her like a black hole into which she disappears. Despite the narrative fault line in Act 2, the Wilis form a powerful image of unified revenge with their bamboo sticks banging out the musical rhythm like devilish warriors.
Khan is less successful in delineating the individuals. When a dancer of Tamara Rojo’s stature is unable to extract from her role as Giselle a fully-fledged character who can surmount the storms around her and elicit our sympathy, it points to weak dramaturgy and suggests the gestural vocabulary on which her character is built is lacking. Like Natalia Osipova in Arthur Pita’s The Mother, Rojo’s classical form loses its emotional compass in contemporary choreography that fails to address the source of its power. James Streeter’s Albrecht is revealed as a one-dimensional figure who stands out from the crowd by his height, his inability to dress like the outcasts while wanting to hide amongst them and his execution of some technically demanding classical steps. It is Jeffrey Cirio as Hilarion who benefits most from Khan’s transposition, giving Giselle’s cloying emotional manipulator a more prominent role as a spivvy factory floor manager who knows how to insinuate himself between the workers and their masters. His more integrated role suggests Khan had in mind an alternative, darker polemic treatment of the narrative — which the visual aspect of Yip’s design and Mark Henderson’s choreographic lighting corroborate — than the romantic mould of Giselle could possibly provide.
English National Ballet, Emerging Dancer Award 2019, Sadler’s Wells, May 7
Rentaro Nakaaki and Julia Conway in Flames of Paris (photo: Laurent Liotardo)
Appearances can be deceptive. On the cover of English National Ballet’s program for Emerging Dancer, the six contestants have been photographed by Laurent Liotardo (post production by Nik Pate) in various sharply delineated, sculptural poses. If the athleticism of these images were to represent the odds of winning, Shale Wagman and Rhys Antoni Yeomans would be in close competition for the prize. Even looking at them on stage as they enter with their respective partners for the pas de deux section, they embody the classical image of the male dancer; perhaps Yeomans has the edge in musculature. But shape is only one element of classical dance; moving between shapes in a rhythm that derives from music is another. Here both Wagman and Yeomans fail to follow up on the promise of their initial images. Wagman is lean and flexible — as he demonstrates abundantly in his contemporary solo — but since so much virtuoso male dance takes place in the air he needs to work on elevation. Yeomans has a better jump but while he can turn exquisitely on the ground he shares with Wagman a malfunctioning ‘spot’ in aerial tours. If ‘emerging dancer’ means the process of polishing rough potential into a physically expressive dancing body Wagman and Yeomans have applied the polish before the expression. Rentaro Nakaaki hasn’t yet arrived but his rough potential is exciting; there are times when his form shows through and he is not afraid to take risks. He has an arsenal of virtuoso steps that overflow with enthusiasm if not attention to line and shape and his character is refreshingly open. Even though he didn’t win he gained my vote for sheer ebullience in the process of emerging.
Liotardo’s photographs of the three women — Alice Bellini, Emilia Cadorin and Julia Conway — are less exciting and fail to distinguish the character of each; Cadorin’s and Conway’s are almost identical. Onstage, however, Conway emerges with the poise and control that deservedly earns her this year’s award. Interestingly she is paired with Nakaaki dancing a pas de deux from Vasily Vainonen’s Flames of Paris. It’s a size too big for Nakaaki at this point in his development but his youthful attack allows Conway to appear calm and assured in her own variations; he’s the storm and she’s its eye. Bellini is paired with Wagman in Victor Gzovsky’s Grand Pas Classique; he’s attending more to the audience than to her which unglues the partnership, but she has a lyrical quality that shines. Cadorin dances Coppélia with Yeomans who is a more boyishly attentive partner. On this occasion Cadorin’s spirit is strong but her upper back — and thus her port de bras — seems constricted so she cannot flow with the romantic sentiment in the music.
The second stage of the competition requires each dancer to perform a contemporary solo of their own choice. Presumably the idea is for the judges and audience to see another aspect of each contestant in terms not only of physical ability but of individual expression. Unlike the classical variations, here the choreography for the most part draws attention to itself, leaving the dancers in the passenger seat; when they are driving there’s a touch of indulgence, as in Wagman’s solo by Sofie Vervaecke, Peculiar Mind. Bellini needs a far more theatrical vehicle for her talents than CLAN B, Sebastian Kloborg’s spoof on La Sylphide, and although Yeomans chooses a great solo by Forsythe, he is left somewhat deflated in the middle by not hitting those glorious accents in Thom Willems’ lush, percussive score. Fabian Reimair’s BAM! for Cadorin doesn’t achieve its title’s promise for her by not giving her enough traction, partly a problem with Reimar’s own score. Nuno Campos gives Nakaaki the one work of the evening that seems tailored for him, showing him in a lean, introspective light; it’s called, appropriately, Own. Similarly Miguel Altunaga’s Untitled Code gives Conway a vehicle for her clarity of expression and keen gestural sense that she carries over from Flames of Paris.
On its tenth anniversary the Emerging Dancer Award celebrates after an intermission with a performance by Francesca Velicu and last year’s award winner, Daniel McCormick in the pas de deux from Act III of Don Quixote. McCormick is a fine dancer but my eyes are drawn to a quality in Velicu that has been missing over the course of the evening: the ability to make the music visible. All Gavin Sutherland’s efforts in the pit directing the English National Ballet Philharmonic have been rewarded.
English National Ballet, Manon, London Coliseum, January 19
The Second Act of ENB’s Manon in Mia Stensgaard’s design (photo: Laurent Liotardo)
In 2013, the first full year of Tamara Rojo’s artistic direction, I saw English National Ballet’s Alison McWhinney and Ken Saruhashi in the Emerging Dancer Award. Almost six years later to see McWhinney take on the title role of Manon in ENB’s revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s work with Saruhashi as her brother Lescaut is one of the many privileges of seeing and writing about dance over a number of years. Although it was Nancy Osbaldeston who won the award that year, I wrote at the time that ‘My heart went out to Alison McWhinney, whose ethereal tenderness in Giselle — she will save many a young man from an early death and will make them all eternally repentant — and her lovely line and poise in Victor Gsovsky’s Grand Pas Classique are a joy to watch.’ The arc of McWhinney’s artistic sensitivity arguably extends to the final act of Manon where having played all her demi-monde cards Manon finds herself in a redemptive endgame with the ever-faithful Des Grieux (Francesco Gabriele Frola). McWhinney casts aside all risks in this demanding duet and receives from Frola the unbridled passion and devotion of an equally liberated partner. It is utterly thrilling and deservedly brings the house down.
For Frola this final act of Manon follows a fine thread of characterization — and its technical counterpart — throughout the ballet. He takes the elegance of MacMillan’s choreography and makes his character and reasoning grow naturally out of it; the coherence of his interpretation remains as lucid as the line of his arabesque. It is McWhinney who in those first two acts does not entirely enter into the complexities of Manon’s character, which in turn hampers the freedom with which she approaches her interpretation of the choreography. The final act shows what she can do when the emotional line is clear, but she has not yet embodied the mercurial changes in circumstance Manon faces — and their inherent contradictions — between the prospect of a nunnery, Des Grieux’s love and Monsieur GM’s cloying wealth.
At the same Emerging Dancer Award in 2013, I noted that ‘Saruhashi has prodigious technical ability but wears his emotions close to the skin, giving an impeccable if somewhat inscrutable rendering of Don Quixote and unwinding only slightly in the all-too-brief Patrice Bart solo, Verdiana.’ It is interesting to see these qualities persist in his interpretation of Lescaut. Dressed in black he stands out as someone already deeply inured in the demi-monde and cynical enough to pimp his own sister. He is sharp and calculating, drawing in his power like a sword but when it comes to his drunken cavorting solo he can’t unwind enough to blur the edges of his technique; he approaches it with too much…calculation. It may be invidious to suggest a comparison but Irek Mukhamedov’s interpretation of this solo — seen online in rehearsal — illustrates just how a prodigious technique with fine comic and musical timing can be married to drunken intent.
Among some fine character roles like Michael Coleman as the Old Man and Fabien Reimair as the Gaoler, there is another interpretation that illustrates Stanislavsky’s maxim that there are no small parts. Francesca Velicu (a finalist in the 2018 Emerging Dancer Award) is one of the courtesans at Madame’s house of ill repute in the second act. It is a stage awhirl in pastel colour and racy activity, but Velicu’s inspired antics among her peers attract attention throughout the melée like light on a filigree pattern, drawing us away momentarily from the main characters before we focus once again on their primary narrative. This is exactly how anyone in the room at the time (and we are all there) would experience the breadth of the moment.
While the choreography in this revival of Manon is all MacMillan (rehearsed by some of the luminaries with whom he worked), the sets and costumes belong to the Royal Danish Ballet’s production designed by Mia Stensgaard. While one had the sense that Nicholas Georgiadis’ original sets were performing alongside the cast, Stensgaard has a more subtle approach, abstracting the scenes with gently moving panels that furnish just the right amount of period suggestion to go with her elegant wigs and finely tailored, colourful costumes. It’s a stylishly minimal production that frames the dancing beautifully while Mikki Kunttu’s cinematic lighting makes the space of each successive scene almost palpable.
The English National Ballet Philharmonic under the baton of Orlando Jopling make listening to Martin Yates’ arrangements of Jules Massenet’s music as much a pleasure as watching the ballet.
English National Ballet, She Said, Sadler’s Wells, April 16
Grayson Perry’s front cloth for She Said
“Dance in its purest form is without gender.” – Ohad Naharin
On message, English National Ballet has fashioned an evening of dance celebrating the female choreographer. She Said brings together Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Aszure Barton from North America and Yabin Wang from China to each create a work for the company. She Said does not set out to compare their works with the male-dominated canon (reflected in its many iconographic forms in Grayson Perry’s delightful mandala-like front cloth) but to respond to the current criticism that we don’t hear enough of the female choreographic voice in contemporary classical work. One can’t argue with that, and even if the qualities of that voice resist clear identification, the experience of watching the three works in She Said is decidedly refreshing. Along with news that English National Ballet has been granted permission by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch to perform Bausch’s Rite of Spring, it seems the initiatives of artistic director Tamara Rojo have an uncanny ability to fill unwarranted gaps in the repertoire while keeping an astute eye on public relations. The profile of the company keeps growing.
Given She Said invokes the gender question, it is perhaps worth noting not all the creative input is female. Lopez Ochoa and Barton both use scores by male composers (Peter Salem and Mason Bates respectively) and Wang seems to have been handed an entire Akram Khan creative toolkit that includes music by Jocelyn Pook, costume design by Kimie Nakano, lighting design by Fabiana Piccioli and video projection by Matt Deely. Given the role of Farooq Chaudhry — co-founder and producer of Akram Khan Company — as creative producer at ENB one can trace a male influence in the choice of Wang’s collaborative team. This might have gone unnoticed but for an overwhelming sense that Pook’s score drowns Wang’s version of the Greek tragedy of Medea, M-Dao. Wang’s approach to Medea is not so much by way of the western notion of fate as through a particularly Eastern sensibility of emotional detachment. Pook misses this subtlety, so M-Dao relies for its effectiveness on its visual construction. Erina Takahashi as Medea is an ideal interpreter for Wang and her articulate, fragile opening solo, one foot in a pale blue pointe shoe the other bare, suggests the enigma of Medea’s character. Because the gestural appearance of James Streeter as Jason and Lauretta Summerscales as his new wife Glauce lack this sense of detachment, their narrative separates naturally from Medea’s and leaves the focus on her. Wang’s understated choreography signifies the drama without getting involved in its outward emotion and she is helped in this by Nakane’s sensibility in set design and Piccioli’s lighting. Deely’s video tends to state rather too much, as if he is afraid Wang’s imagery is not enough, but it is Pook’s fleshy, middle-eastern mix of a score that simply overrides the quiet articulation of Wang’s choreography; we can barely see for hearing.
The opening work, Lopez Ochoa’s Broken Wings, is based on the life and love of Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo. Lopez Ochoa remembers Rojo giving her a list of female figures in history and literature from which to choose a subject, but she kept coming back to Kahlo. Spanish culture is a bond between choreographer and director/interpreter, and Kahlo provides Rojo with a role for which she has an affinity. She is most effective at the beginning as a young, spirited girl playing with the Day of the Dead skeletons; her sense of fun and self-confidence is palpable. Kahlo’s adolescent life was brutally interrupted by a tram accident that left her an invalid but Lopez Ochoa gives Rojo’s transformation a soft balletic treatment — a turned-in, shaking leg that she clutches but which can nevertheless reach 190 degrees behind her when called for — without the tormented, emotional dimension that gave rise to Kahlo’s creativity. Lopez Ochoa uses the visual symbolism of Dieuweke van Reij’s set design to suggest Kahlo’s flights of imagination as well as a corps of male dancers (a lovely inversion) dressed and brilliantly painted (by Dominic Skinner) as Kahlo’s feminine spirits. Broken Wings also provides a wonderful role for Irek Mukhamedov as the painter Diego Rivera. His passionate on-again-off-again relationship with Kahlo is the stuff of legend, and Mukhamedov fills those legendary shoes with weighty, captivating flair.
Mukhamedov is also the company’s principal ballet master, and some of the credit must go to him for the outstanding level of technique evident in the last work, Barton’s Fantastic Beings. Of all the voices this evening, Barton’s is the one I hear most clearly: someone who is confident of what she can coax from the dancers, skilled in putting it together with subtle and witty imagery (enhanced by Burke Brown’s lighting and Michelle Jank’s costumes), and assured in making the music an equal partner to the choreography. This latter aspect is perhaps the only weakness: the length of Fantastic Beings is dictated by Bates’ existing score, which draws out Barton’s wealth of invention beyond its choreographic endpoint. Nevertheless, the technical demands Barton brings out of the dancers are inspired and in turn the dancers — particularly Isaac Hernandez — respond with a precision, clarity and imagination that is thrilling to see. Fantastic beings indeed.
The three modern masters represented in English National Ballet (ENB)’s triple bill at Sadler’s Wells — Jiří Kylián, John Neumeier and William Forsythe — are all related in that they learned their trade in John Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet before forging their own distinctive styles of classical dance in their respective companies: Kylián in The Hague, Neumeier in Hamburg and Forsythe in Frankfurt. The three works performed this evening are like cousins, having their beginnings in a rich artistic period in Europe within two years of the fall of the Berlin Wall and have since been staged by companies around the world.
Kylián’s Petite Mort (1991) is already in the ENB stable since its acquisition in 2013 but its wit and elegance is worth seeing again. Well, it would be if the wit and elegance were in evidence, but on Wednesday night the elegance is hijacked by a display of overly muscular male torsos swishing fencing foils and the witty eroticism sidelined by their narcissistic posing. The six women, looking decidedly out of scale, don’t stand a chance, not even Tamara Rojo who is positively engulfed in Max Westwell’s physique. Not all the men suffer from this muscular overdevelopment — Junor Souza balances strength with lithe form and he is well suited in his duet with Laurretta Summerscales — but with six of them in nothing but high-waisted trunks the impression of bulk is overwhelming. One of the subtleties of Petite Mort is in Kylian’s use of the parallel qualities of the supple steel foil and the male body; petite mort is, after all, the French euphemism for orgasm and the analogy of death from the thrust of a foil with the little death of the final thrust in love is central to the imagery of the work. The foils haven’t changed since 1991 but the male bodies have; if these studs don’t rein in their weight training their future work with foils will be like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger sewing. Which makes me think of the poor costume department…
What a welcome relief to see Alejandro Virelles and Cesar Corrales in the first act of Neumeier’s Spring and Fall, choreographed to the five movements of Antonin Dvořák’s Serenade in E major. Here are two male dancers whose physique appears to be formed by classical training alone; they both move effortlessly and quietly from the inside, which is a totally different approach from the gym-enhanced school. With its pastel colours and white costumes (Neumeier’s own conception) the setting of Spring and Fall suggests a happy, youthful memory in which an ardent Virelles and a flirtatious but spirited Alina Cojocaru express their burgeoning love against a chorus of friends. Virelles and Cojocaru are beautifully matched in their ease of technique and lack of pretence that comes from the mastery of their art. The choreography is abstract but it is not hard to read. As Neumeier says, ‘As soon as there are two people there is some kind of relationship. And those human relationships are what interest me as a choreographer.’ Apart from the three principals, the supporting cast prove a little ragged, but Anjuli Hudson stands out with her uninhibited enthusiasm.
Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated was first choreographed on the Paris Opéra Ballet in 1987 when Rudolph Nureyev was artistic director. Forsythe remembers ‘the whole atmosphere there was electric.’ The first cast included a young Sylvie Guillem, Laurent Hilaire, Isabelle Guérin and Manuel Legris. Imagine those long legs arriving at the height of a percussive climax in Thom Willems’ electronic score and what Forsythe’s elongated, dynamic, off-balance shapes must have looked like. There is also a chic cool in the way the dancers wander in and start their variations, something the French do so well. It is still a thrilling dance to watch with its spatial dynamics and visceral physicality, though Wednesday’s cast is less tall, less elongated than its ideal execution demands: the dynamics of the steps don’t quite match the dynamics of the score. In terms of coolness, Tiffany Hedman seems to have the measure of the work but the same can’t be said about James Streeter, fresh from fencing, who mistakes open-mouthed, brazen posing for cool assurance. It’s that bodybuilding thing again.
English National Ballet: Emerging Dancer 2013, Queen Elizabeth Hall, March 4
English National Ballet has an enterprising Learning program that encourages the public to engage in ballet through various interactive projects. This time last year I was drawn to their Dance in Focus, an opportunity to develop dance photography under the guidance of Chris Nash, and recently I joined their stimulating Dance is the Word workshop on critical dance writing with Donald Hutera. It was structured around ENB’s Emerging Dancer 2013, a platform that encourages promising artists within the company to step up to a new level. Each year six dancers — thee men and three women up to the rank of soloist (this year they are all Artists of the Company) — are chosen to prepare for this privilege on top of their demanding touring schedule. Unlike last year, where dancers were judged on two solos, the 2013 competition is based on a solo and a pas de deux, a framework that allows both individual expression and fine-tuning with a partner.
We watch the dancers in company class in the Festival Hall’s Clore Ballroom and later in dress rehearsal on stage in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Neither of these preparatory processes is designed for public observation; they are places for each dancer to iron out technical, spatial, costume or lighting problems under the aegis of company teachers and directors, so the presence of even a small number of spectators can have an ambivalent effect on the artists. It is the performance on which the dancers are judged, after all, and that is the moment for which they summon all their powers.
It is the nature of competition to single out a winner and Nancy Osbaldeston rose to the challenge to carry off this year’s prize. John Neumeier’s fluid solo Bach Suite No. 2 is a perfect vehicle for her radiant turns and effortless ballon and in the pas de deux from Don Quixote with Ken Saruhashi she replaces Kitri’s dark vein of passion with her naturally bright ebullience. Osbaldeston doesn’t have the classical lines of Laurretta Summerscales or Alison McWhinney, but she has a star quality that makes her shine in whatever she does.
The award is made on the night by a jury of five (Tamara Rojo, Darcey Bussell, Luke Jennings, Tommy Franzén and Jude Kelly), but an additional prize is the result of audience votes over the previous season. In 2012 the jury and the public concurred, but this year’s People’s Choice recognized the qualities of Summerscales, whose wit and intelligence and swan-like ability to reveal beauty without any apparent effort are the mark of a great artist. For her solo, she danced the Calliope Rag from Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Élite Syncopations; she could have brought out a more unctuously flirtatious quality, but her musicality and sense of fun were evident. My heart went out to McWhinney, whose ethereal tenderness in Giselle — she will save many a young man from an early death and will make them all eternally repentant — and her lovely line and poise in Victor Gsovsky’s Grand Pas Classique are a joy to watch.
It is fitting in the year Tamara Rojo becomes artistic director that the women feature so strongly in this competition. In a sense they have already emerged, showing a mature self-awareness in their choice of solo to complement their pas de deux. The men are not quite so astute: Saruhashi and Nathan Young choose solos that challenge their technical skills but that do little to enhance their stage presence, while Guilherme Menezes, whose enthusiasm and innocence draw us naturally into his confidence, has the right idea — a loose, clown-like solo by Nicky Ellis to contrast with the Black Swan pas de deux — but the choreography is not well enough developed to fully reveal his energies and qualities. Saruhashi has prodigious technical ability but wears his emotions close to the skin, giving an impeccable if somewhat inscrutable rendering of Don Quixote and unwinding only slightly in the all-too-brief Patrice Bart solo, Verdiana. Nathan Young gives full play to his romantic spirit and partnering ability in Giselle, but his style in Bournonville’s Napoli variation is too muscular to bring out the Danish charm and buoyancy.
It is worth noting that Osbaldeston and Summerscales were finalists in 2011 and 2012 respectively; it will be interesting to see which of this year’s three men will emerge in 2014.
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