Evening of crystalline treats is an offbeat avant-garde dream
Merce Cunningham tribute Royal Ballet, Covent Garden ★★★★☆
This crisp, clear little Fox’s Glacier Mint of an evening was the idea of Royal Ballet director Kevin O’hare – and a jolly fine one it was too. This year marks the centenary of the birth of Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), the US avant-garde choreographer who has, in some way or another, influenced pretty much every contemporary choreographer since.
It was after seeing two pieces by the American in 1964 (during his first London tour), both set to Satie, that Frederick Ashton, the Royal’s founding choreographer, decided to make his own, contemporary-feeling masterpiece to the same composer, Monotones II. And Pam Tanowitz, who recently scored a hit at the Barbican with Four Quartets, is a New Yorkbased choreographer steeped in Cunningham training and technique. Why not put all three together on a one-hour, interval-free bill at the burnished new Linbury Theatre? And why not have some of the company’s hottest dancers participate?
After a few filmed interviews, the evening launched – as it had to – with a piece by Cunningham himself, one that Ashton would have seen in London in 1964, though not one of the two Satie-led creations. Cross Currents is, instead, set to almost comically rebarbative music by Conlon Nancarrow, which (typically of him) sounds like two amphetamined-up cats sharpening their claws inside a grand piano.
Essentially a study in friction between movement and stillness, unity and disorder, the piece is far from easy watching (or listening), and clearly put the dancers – star principals Francesca Hayward, Matthew Ball and superb first soloist Mayara Magri – through their paces. It was fascinating to see these three superlative dramatic and musical dancers bleed their performances of all emotion and step into Cunningham’s strange universe where dance and music exist only in nevertouching parallel. All three rose superbly to the occasion.
The same goes for the less stellar trio of Melissa Hamilton, Reece Clarke and Nicol Edmonds, who then tackled Monotones II (1965). Set to Satie’s Gymnopédies, this bonsai masterpiece – which spawned a second section the following year, the counter-intuitively named Monotones I – is a luminous, almost cruelly exposed little piece full of taxing lifts, holds and balances.
One tiny, barely noticeable collision aside, this trio of soloists and first soloists delivered a performance of great, collective poise, the sweat visible on their foreheads in the up-close Linbury, but the effort otherwise expertly hidden.
It was also a tonic to hear this work danced, for a change, to the perfectly spare solo piano of Satie’s original, as opposed to the soupy Debussy orchestrations traditionally used. But most arresting of all, in the wake of Cross Currents, were the fleeting but unmistakable moments when this work, by a master neoclassicist, suddenly looked like Cunningham, actually set to music.
Closing the evening was Tanowitz’s new, longer, bigger piece, Everyone Keeps Me. Coming after two such economical and sparkling hors d’oeuvres, this main course – an intricate, postmodern workout for nine dancers – couldn’t help feeling just ever so slightly hefty by comparison, but that is being harsh: it’s a strong, zesty piece of work, and rather beautiful in places. In the context of this bill, it seemed to be fusing the neoclassical structural exactitude of Monotones and offbeat, barefoot physicality and apparent randomness of Cross Currents into a new, complex, constantly interesting whole (danced in “flatties”).
It also, on Thursday evening, allowed this larger ensemble to shine, with Anna Rose O’sullivan the first among equals: I’ve never before seen her dancing find such a crisp, attention-grabbing register. Tanowitz must have been proud of them all – as, I suspect, would both Cunningham and Ashton have been of the entire, crystalline evening.
Run now ended.