Wayne Mcgregor raises his game
The chief individual star of the Royal Ballet’s Bernstein Centenary triple bill is, wouldn’t you know it, Leonard Bernstein. Good grief, what an embarrassment of musical riches the evening proves, and all credit, too, to the house orchestra and various visiting soloists.
Of the two new dance works on the programme, the more successful is Wayne Mcgregor’s Yugen. This is set to Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, and it sees the Royal’s resident choreographer marshal a cast of 11 with great authority.
Against celebrated artist and author Edmund de Waal’s grand backdrop of tall, hollow cubes that hint subtly at cathedral windows – complemented by Lucy Carter’s lighting and tasteful red costumes by Shirin Guild – Mcgregor swiftly has the stage teeming with motion. He deploys his traditional, previously often overdone tropes with notable restraint and judgment, and the choreography treats the female dancers with respect.
Throughout, Mcgregor also responds sensitively to both words and music. In Part II, he makes particularly tender use of the famous Psalm 23:1-4, here a passage for solo boy treble and harp (take a bow, young William Davies), and soon has three couples simultaneously engaging with each other with an intensity that borders on desperation.
Added choreographic elements in Part III – an attractive but not overly mimetic prayer-like quality to the steps; a lovely moment where a trio advance towards us as if threading a human braid – complement a short, attractive, mature work that the dancers respond to with what looks like genuine enthusiasm. On which subject, if Sarah Lamb very ably dominates the show, and Federico Bonelli et al provide excellent support, it is impossible not to mention the (rather underused) Francesca Hayward, so light and so musical that she at times seems able to move in two directions at the same time.
The evening’s other novelty is by that first-rate neo-classicist (and artistic associate of the Royal Ballet), Christopher Wheeldon. A direct but less literal-minded descendant of Corybantic Ecstasies – also set to Bernstein’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium – which he made in 1999 for Boston Ballet, Corybantic Games is a five-parter for a large ensemble, and it sees Wheeldon making a return to abstraction after a long run of narrative works.
Not to be confused with Corbynites, the Corybants were the dancing worshippers of the Phrygian goddess Cybele. And, if the choreography doesn’t quite reach the exultant fever pitch you might have hoped for or expected, Wheeldon does at least succeed in lending an organic quality to the various vignettes.
A little like Mcgregor in Yugen, he deftly deploys contrapuntal little groups of dancers at the rear of the stage, and also whips up nice, sensual little clusters at the fore. I also particularly enjoyed a luxuriant solo for Beatriz Stix-brunell in Part II, as well as Part IV’S three couples. To an especially stirring passage of Bernstein’s, they lyrically and compellingly explore various aspects and permutations of love.
If the choreography is respectable rather than vintage Wheeldon, what really hobbles the piece is its design. Jean-marc Puissant’s louvred backdrops are attractive in themselves, but deaden the action rather than complementing it, while the costumes, by noted fashion designer Erdem, are a fright. True, in going for what appears to be a 21st-century take on classical antiquity, they do echo the old-meetsnew spirit of the Bernstein. But, in striving so hard to be sexy, they miss it by a mile, while the black straps and ribbons that both encase the dancers’ bodies and flap distractingly around them might be described as “gaffertape chic”.
In between Mcgregor’s and Wheeldon’s works comes the one returning piece, Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety (2014). Playing out to Bernstein’s second symphony, and kicking off in a New York bar, this is an adaptation of WH Auden’s 1947 poem.
As in 2014, it comes across as a beautifully designed but exasperating piece with dance-theatrical shades of Matthew Bourne, but sans the crucial Bourne spark. Certainly, Scarlett is a naturally musical choreographer, and knows how to show people off. On Thursday, Alexander Campbell was on particularly scene-stealing form as the sexually ambivalent navvy, though the entire lead quartet (Lamb, Bennet Gartside, Tristan Dyer) were strong, and Leticia Stock also made a striking impression in the secondary role of soldier’s girlfriend.
However, in necessarily ditching the words, the piece winds up as a slight tableau of four people papering over the never-elucidated melancholy of their lives, and little more.