Dancing the genetic code
has traditionally divided classical and contemporary audiences.
Wayne McGregor has been resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet since 2006 but combines this role — and countless international projects — with his directorship of his own company, whose Autobiography premièred at the Wells earlier this month. It is not a straight narrative (perish the thought), but 23 distinct elements (one for each pair of chromosomes) delivered in an order that varied nightly thanks to an algorithm based on Mr McGregor’s genetic code.
The shuffled vignettes are performed (exquisitely) by ten dancers beneath a grid of wire pyramids and strafed by Lucy Carter’s foggy blades of light. McGregor has toned down his trademark hyperextensions and there is a whiff of the barre about the language with dancers zipping through beaten steps, pirouettes and pretty chains of turns.
Merce Cunningham was randomising dance back in the 1950s. It’s still a valid creative tool, but it is hard to sustain for 90 minutes. Fine as a promenade installation in the Tate’s Turbine Hall, but it makes for unsatisfying theatre.
Structure was only one of the weaknesses of Shobana Jeyasingh’s Bayadère — The Ninth Life, a contemporary Indian take on Marius Petipa’s cardamom-scented 1877 masterpiece. The 60-minute, tenman show premièred at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio two years ago but has been pimped and revised for the 29-year-old company’s Sadler’s Wells debut. There is a new dramaturg (did they break the old one?) and handsome new designs. Sander Loonen’s ravishing video projections create vast dust storms, which crystallise into dancing figures, and Tom Piper furnishes great tangles of fairy-lit copper wire and a glass-sided box — part TV screen, part terrarium — in which Jeyasingh can unpick her vexed relationship with ballet’s orientalist love triangle.
It is a first-rate idea and the feather-footed Sooraj Subramaniam remains mesmerising as the modern-day man who drifts into a dream world in which ballet is trumped by bharatanatyam. But Jeyasingh’s thesis — a halfbaked essay on colonialist misogyny — misfires. The choreography never delivers on the potentially fascinating disconnect between Petipa’s naveljewelled pastiche and the authentic dances that inspired it. Even two dramaturgs can’t save the 60-minute piece from sagging in the middle and petering out at the end.
Royal Ballet old boys Michael Nunn and William Trevitt never wanted ‘ballet’ on their letterhead. They began life as ‘George Piper Dances’ but got stuck with the BalletBoyz handle, and the men-only line-up it implies, after a hit Channel 4 documentary of the same name. Four of the numbers in Fourteen Days, their latest fivepart touring programme, were premières, linked by a theme of ‘balance’ and composed within a strict, two-week timeframe. The dancers were on top form and the evening enjoyed the luxury of a 12-piece orchestra, but their material wasn’t always worthy of them. By arrangement with
the Spectator