The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Now everyone gets a kick out of dance
iniquities of Craig Revel Horwood’s voting on Strictly Come Dancing, and Britain’s grandest ballet companies increasingly invited contemporary choreographers from across the globe to make new and often sociopolitically aware works for them, barriers between highbrow and populist, East and West, classical and contemporary, young and old, even male and female, have been swept aside.
No Briton has done more to extend dance’s breadth and depth than Akram Khan. Although entirely unversed in classical ballet, the Wimbledon-born, 5ft 5in wonder (trained instead in western contemporary and north Indian kathak) contributed a remarkable new piece, Dust, to English National Ballet’s 2014 First World War centenary bill Lest We Forget. Then, to prove it was no fluke, in 2016 – also at the request of ENB’s far-sighted dancer-director Tamara Rojo – he reworked the most quintessential (and inviolable) romantic ballet, Giselle, for the migrant-crisis era. Thanks to the company’s DVDs, live broadcasts and dauntless touring, well over 300,000 people are now believed to have seen it, the equivalent of selling out the Royal Opera House roughly 150 times.
Khan’s pieces for himself have also set the standard. In 2016, he made his astonishing mythological, gender-switching tale of female empowerment Until the Lions, well before genderfluidity or MeToo were making headlines. Back in 2011, his childhood memories of talking to older relatives led to the phantasmagorical exploration of his Bengali roots that was DESH (or “Homeland”). Last year, another Great War tribute and magic-realist solo venture, Xenos, saw him pay touching tribute to the 4.5million non-British soldiers (including 1.5million Indians) who died fighting for Britain between 1914 and 1918. As with DESH, Xenos required Khan, completely solo, and by now aged 43, to hold the stage for more than an hour, and it too turned out to be a 24-carat masterpiece.
The other choreographer who has dominated the decade is Crystal Pite. Nothing seems to be beyond this mild-mannered, borderline genius from Canada. The past four years alone have seen her dive nerve-shreddingly into the desperate coping strategies of the mind in Betroffenheit (2015), transform Scottish Ballet into eerily swarming insects in Emergence (2016), and lay bare – far more vividly than newsreel footage ever can – the plight of refugees across the millennia in Flight Pattern, for the Royal Ballet
(also 2016). Like Khan’s finest, these are pieces that require no previous knowledge of (or even fondness for) dance to appreciate: their empathetic brilliance speaks for itself.
The Royal Ballet has, for its part, continued to delight and dismay. Under the directorship of Kevin O’Hare, who took over from Monica Mason in 2012, Britain’s flagship company has sparkled in revivals but in new works it has repeatedly depressed, all but ignoring female choreographers, and allowing the
Fellas, put your willies away, go home, and please don’t come back. likes of Wayne McGregor, Alastair Marriott and especially Liam Scarlett far too free a hand. Although there have been wonderful exceptions – such as Flight Pattern, or Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale (2014) – the overwhelming majority of its novelties have been forgettable at best. For that reason, although I’d love to know exactly why a new piece by Scarlett was pulled from this coming February’s schedules, I found it hard to mourn its pre-emptive passing.
This decade may have belonged less to ballet and more to contemporary dance (the “Sadler’s Wells” crew of Khan, Pite, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Hofesh Shechter and so on) and dance theatre (Arthur Pita and his partner, the great Matthew Bourne), but the Royal Ballet has nevertheless had an extraordinary, era-defining ace up its sleeve, one that O’Hare has played just right. Ten years ago, a young Sussex-reared dancer called Francesca Hayward joined the company. In 2014, she was given the big “break” of the lead in Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, where she showed far more established stars how it is done. Since then, she has evolved into the definitive ballerina of her generation, a genuine all-time great who sprinkles magic on every role she touches.
What’s more, this Friday she will be unleashed on the world as the star of Tom Hooper’s Cats, the £70million film adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Of all the fascinating prospects in store for dance lovers – from the launch of Carlos Acosta’s directorship of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January to (if there is any justice in the world) Kelvin Fletcher hip-wiggling his way to victory in Strictly a fortnight earlier – this is perhaps the most fascinating. Frankie’s gone to Hollywood. But what on earth will happen next?
Barriers between highbrow and populist have been swept aside