A windswept trip to Texas that fails to blow you away
Mixed bill Royal Ballet, Covent Garden
Arthur Pita’s The Wind is a valiant dance-theatrical stab at a well-chosen story, but one that doesn’t come close to blowing you away. This is all the sadder to report, given that his 2011 adaptation of another noirish, early20th-century novel – Kafka’s
Metamorphosis – remains one of the most brilliant new creations to appear at Covent Garden in the past 20 years.
The Wind is based on Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 novel and Victor Sjöström’s 1928 film version. It centres on Letty Mason, an ingénue from lush Virginia who moves to the barren wilds of 1880s Texas and is driven spare by the isolation and relentless wind. She finds herself hastily married to one of the local cowpunchers (Lige Hightower), and is viciously preyed upon by a cattle buyer, Wirt Roddy.
While the story has plenty of dance-friendly ingredients, the dramatic soufflé here never rises. At 37 minutes, the work is too short to allow the characters to breathe or us to sink into their story. This is exacerbated by the fact that, although Pita delineates his characters in movement, the piece is very light on actual choreography. Natalia Osipova (a frenetic live wire as Letty), Edward Watson (the wind incarnate as a Comanche wraith), Thiago Soares (a swaggering Hightower) – they all do their expert best, but there simply isn’t enough dance for us to get to care about them.
As for the design, while Yann Seabra has done sterling work on the costumes, the set and lighting are misconceived, never once evoking the intimidating vastness of the American West. Rather than be left to do their stuff in the wings, designer Jeremy Herbert’s three enormous (and presumably costly) wind machines are constantly and deliberately in view. True, there’s cunning use of long, ferociously billowing sheets to evoke storms and so on, and also the novelty of having wind gusting out over the stalls (do bring a cardie). But this trio of huge contraptions distract from the dance, sap the atmosphere and drastically limit the size of the stage.
There are some good ideas here, and Pita could still be the man to turn Scarborough’s melodrama into a rich, dance-driven study of “prairie madness”. However, this production needs a major overhaul if it is to deserve a permanent home on the Covent Garden main stage.
The evening gets off to an elegant enough but unexciting start with Twyla Tharp’s abstract The Illustrated “Farewell”, an expansion of her 1973 piece As Time Goes By. Although Tharp (a sprightly 76) is too smart, musical and experienced a choreographer to deliver anything other than polished work, this fails to beguile. A muscular Steven Mcrae and fragile-looking Sarah Lamb dance that challenging new passage with great technical assurance, but with a lack of punch on her part and too much camp on his. Despite more appealing performances elsewhere, the piece passes the time without ever prickling the skin.
The bill closes with the first revival of Untouchable, the socially pointed work by the pioneering Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter. When this premiered in 2014 – in the cruelly elevated company of Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and Macmillan’s Song of the Earth – it felt like the weak link. Not so here.
With smart, simple staging and stunning lighting, this compassionate study of running (or not) with the herd basks in the daunting hugeness of the Covent Garden stage, reminding you what an open-goal The Wind misses in this respect. While not quite sixcylinder Shechter overall, it’s the only piece here that touches the heart, and the undisputable highlight. A relief of sorts – but also a worry.