Romance and heartache in a tale of menace and dark magic

Dance

Result? A packed and thoroughly welcoming house on Friday night. No local-loyalty bias needed, however, to hail Hampson’s one-act narrative ballet, Storyville, as the closing highpoint of the evening.

With music by Kurt Weill conjuring up smoke-filled bars, decadent low life and forlorn hopes, Storyville weaves menace and dark Louisiana magic – as well as some tender romance – into its “good girl gone wrong” scenario. Country innocent Nola (Cira Robinson) arrives in the city, still holding on to her lookalike dolly. She soon loses it, and much else, when Lulu (Sayaka Ichikawa) slinks up on her: next stop – the dubious dance hall where Lulu and the sinister pimp, Mack, use the doll to cast controlling spells on Nola. By the time Nola’s sailor sweetheart returns, it is too late for the happy ending their earlier, lyrical duets seemed to promise. Hampson’s choreography, with its episodes of brash lads on the lam punctuating Nola’s graphic descent into prostitution, delivers clear-cut drama with an edge of heartache – and it brings out strong, characterful performances at every level.

Before then, Robinson, in a crystal-encrusted tutu, is the dazzling doll-like ballerina in Arthur Pita’s Cristaux, a sharplyetched duet to the tinkling loops of Steve Reich’s Drumming Part III. Mthuthuzeli November (in more subdued garb) partnered her as if enslaved by the brilliance of costume and choreography alike. In the middle, but somewhat eclipsed by these other works, Christopher Marney’s To Begin, Begin deployed a large blue cloth as a kind of “screen wipe” between duets and ensembles.

All six dancers gave real substance and a degree of purpose to choreography that, like the material, was prone to wafting about.