Pite hits a new high
Mixed bill Royal Ballet, Covent Garden
There was a particularly rapt hush at Covent Garden on Thursday evening as Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern began – and small wonder. For one thing, this is the Royal Ballet’s first new main-stage work by a woman in 18 years. For another, the 46-year-old contemporary choreographer has, in recent years, delivered a succession of first-rate pieces (for her own troupe, Kidd Pivot, and others), whereas most of the Royal Ballet’s new works of late have been duds. Might the Canadian be the person to stop the rot?
Gosh, yes. This 30-minute piece was inspired by the refugee crisis that rages still, and the result is a dark, dreamlike, profoundly empathetic portrayal of people in limbo.
Also relevant to countless other periods of history, the work plays out to the palindromically structured first movement of Górecki’s famous Third Symphony, in Tom Visser’s artfully maintained twilight. It begins with all 36 cast members huddled together in tight rows, staring blankly up at a high, mist-shrouded point of light. They rock backwards and forwards, shoot glances about them, and fall in and out of line. Together with their colourless garb, the effect is of people drained of all identity, yet also lent dignity by the poetic, fluid ripples of their shared movement.
A tall fissure opens up at the back of the stage (the work of designer Jay Gower Taylor, Pite’s husband), the gate to some kind of holding pen. Once in, their body language is initially even more self-protective, but soon each person is trying to eke out a bed-space, a tiny plot they can call their own. However, the shared, oh-so-subtle pulse to their movement here feels like a collective heartbeat that refuses to be extinguished.
The spotlight soon falls on one couple: Kristen McNally and Marcelino Sambé. I won’t say how, but their central vignette suggests a devastating loss that, by the stunning close, appears to have laid waste to their hopes. (Both dancers are superb.)
Pite’s marshalling of this huge ensemble is remarkable, while marvellous choreographic flourishes abound: the groups trying to break out of the fold but suddenly freezing in formation, exactly like water turning to ice, come most readily to mind. In short, Pite really seems to understand these dancers – and they, her. Together, they’ve created a heartrending but extraordinarily beautiful emotional odyssey that nevertheless seems to pass in the blink of an eye.
Preceding Flight Pattern is Christopher Wheeldon’s blissfully spare After the Rain, here given its full dues by the sextet in the first half and, supremely, by Marianela Núñez and Thiago Soares in the second. Here, Wheeldon channels Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (“Mirror in the Mirror”) into an exquisitely intimate slow-motion duet to which the duo bring extraordinary tenderness.
David Dawson’s The Human Seasons (2013) is the weak link of the evening. A gently melancholic, Keats-inspired look at the passing of the years, it has plenty of craft, but in this company looks fussy.
So, an evening of life-cycles and looking-glasses, patterns and palindromes – hardly upbeat, but sleekly done, and with an unmissable new creation at its heart. Go if you can.
In rep until March 24. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk