Local heroes make for a sure-footed opening
With Hull’s successful UK City of Culture 2017 programme in full swing, how better to herald the reopening of the New Theatre (following a splendid £16million refurbishment) than with a star-studded gala performance by the Royal Ballet? Some 1,200 people inside the theatre were joined by another 5,000 watching a relayed film screening in Hull’s Queens Gardens, making the performance a genuinely historic cultural event for the city.
In a nice touch, the organisers arranged for the film relay to be put on a 30-minute delay. This gave the dancers time after the show to make their way to the Gardens and take their bows before the audience watching on the big screen.
The match-up between the worldrenowned ballet company and Hull’s year-long celebration of the arts is rooted in the city’s considerable contribution to dance. Kevin O’hare, director of the Royal Ballet, was born in Hull and made a number of his early performances at the theatre.
Early in this incredibly diverse programme of 17 short pieces, O’hare came on stage to speak about the importance of the city to him, to his company and to the world of dance. Not only did the director’s offering include three Royal Ballet dancers past and present (namely, Elizabeth Harrod, Demelza Parish and her brother, Xander Parish) who are from the area, it also starred Joseph Caley (principal dancer with English National Ballet), who was born in Hull.
Indeed, Caley’s performance of David Bintley’s Hamlet solo from The Shakespeare Suite was one of the highlights of the evening. The performance had jazzy choreography, mixing playfulness and melancholy, set to music by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and it was executed with a delightfully paradoxical combination of expressive individualism and faithful exactitude.
The mixed programme presented perfectly pitched tasters from such choreographic greats as Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, William Forsythe and Kenneth Macmillan. The audience very much appreciated the inclusion in the show of dancers (some of them very young indeed) from Hull-based Northern Academy of Performing Arts and two other local dance schools.
If there was a standout, it was, surely, the pas de deux from Wayne Mcgregor’s Qualia. Danced to intense music by experimental composer Robin David Rimbaud (aka Scanner), the modernist piece was performed with muscularity and eroticism by Melissa Hamilton and Edward Watson.
By the time the show closed, with a gorgeous Petipa pas de deux by local hero Caley and the immense Akane Takada, the audience were out of their re-upholstered seats and cheering this memorable gala to the rafters.