Medusa for the Metoo era is outshone by a refugee odyssey
The son of a Moroccan father and Belgian mother, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is also teetotal and a vegan: “An Arab who doesn’t eat meat, and a Belgian who doesn’t drink beer,” as he once put it to me. This sense of apartness has helped spur him on to become one of the greatest contemporary choreographers of the
modern age, constantly seeking out and exploring common threads between distant cultures. And it has also, it seems, been fundamental to his debut piece for the Royal Ballet.
In Medusa, he tells a version of the Ancient Greek myth in which the beautiful titular character is raped by Poseidon. However, rather than punish him, it is she that Athena turns on, transforming her into a monster who can turn men to stone just by looking at them: the ultimate outsider, you might say. Perseus is sent to kill her, and, after he beheads her, Medusa’s soul is finally liberated. This does, then, mean yet more sexual violence towards women on the Covent Garden stage. But Cherkaoui’s intentions here are at least far from gratuitous. Medusa becomes a kind of Metoo-era avenging angel, afflicted but also empowered by her curse. She is smartly drawn by Cherkaoui and portrayed with complete commitment by Natalia Osipova: lustrously sensual at the start, savagely angular after her hair is turned into a seething (or, as here, rather static) knot of snakes, and making superbly expressive use of her arms throughout.
The piece is also elegantly and cleverly designed (by Cherkaoui himself), with large pillars that aptly evoke classical antiquity but also descend on to the stage like the bars of some enormous cage. It also boasts luxuriant dresses for the women, and plays out to an intricate interweaving of Purcell and slick electronica.
What it fatally lacks overall, however – after a striking start – is almost any dynamic variation. For the main part, the piece trundles forward in the same, rather low gear, with neither the dancers’ technique nor the inherent drama of the story even close to fully exploited. It’s as if Cherkaoui was slightly cowed by Covent Garden, reining in his usual adventurousness rather than letting it fly. (Rating: * * *).
Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour (Rating: * * * * ) isn’t exactly adventurous either, but this abstract neoclassical workout expertly responds to the ebb and flow of its score – part Vivaldi, part Ezio Bossi – is full of striking physical counterpoint, and on opening night gave a super cast ample chance to shine.
The evening concludes with the first revival of Flight Pattern, Crystal Pite’s 2017 response to the Syrian refugee crisis (Rating: * * * * * ). Now, as then, this supremely well-danced depiction of people trudging fearfully towards an uncertain future strikes me as a modern masterpiece, as poetically compassionate a work of art as has ever been created.
This review appeared in some earlier editions