I’m late to catch this Ballet Black double bill, a co-commission with the Barbican, seen there in May this year, but I’m so glad I made it to its penultimate night at the smaller Linbury. A medley of music, including David Bowie’s “Heroes”, plays in the auditorium whilst we wait for curtain-up (so to speak). I’m already jiggling in my seat.
An interesting medley of music drives the first thirty-five-minute piece Sophie Laplane’s If At First: from Beethoven, Olivia Belli, Dans Dans, Michelle Gurevich, Dustin O’Halloran and Tom Harrold. Eclectic is an understatement, but it works.
Choreographer’s programme notes and intentions often don't tally with what one sees and interprets, especially in abstract dance that strives for narrative. The press release states the piece “explores the complexity of humanity, heroism and self-acceptance”.
Choreographer-in-Residence at Scottish Ballet, Laplane, says she was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Eroica” painting, which leads directly to Beethoven and his symphony’s crossed-out dedication to Napoleon. What I see is more Shakespearean. A papier-mâché crown is fought over, seized, handed around. Is the owner King Lear or the Fool?
Is it The Hollow Crown? Is that duet between two lovers Hamlet and Ophelia? She dies in his arms. And I think of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1988 Sea of Troubles ballet. Conflict, scramble, reconciliation… Laplane’s patchwork ballet is full of snapshot scenes, jigsaw pieces that we have to make fit.
Mirrors and reflections of central power, acolytes, sycophants and petulant rivals circle the one with the crown. Is it a children’s game this Bayeux tapestry of movement...? David Plater’s lighting, moody, smoky, focuses our gaze in pools and squares of light.
The music is the guide, classical, jazzy, funky, a twanging guitar (I’m a sucker for a twanging guitar), a cinematic sound-score (do I hear animal cries?). I love Michelle Gurevich’s I’ll Be Your Woman (2007), which wraps it up. As does the multiplicity of crowns—they all end up with a crown—kings of music and dance.
Mthuthuzeli November’s The Waiting Game has had a makeover. He says he was influenced by Samuel Beckett, a man waiting for his life to be over, but I see Kafka, a man oppressed. Ebony Thomas plays the man. Isabela Coracy is the voice in his head.
Internal thoughts are lip-synched in this thirty-minute dance of two halves, the first moody, lonely; the second, “a long time later”, glitzy. A moving doorway is the metaphor.
Will he go through it, over it, who will he let into his closed mind? The choreographic language is questing, introverted, very Crystal Pite, as is the lip-synch, which she has made her own.
The door is a way into the cabaret theatre world. We are in a dressing room. The chorus are pushing the leading man out, but can he do this night after night, the same thing? That’s life, isn’t it, absurd, but we must live it best we can. Put on a show and a brave face. It’ll help it to pass.
Thomas is dazzling in his sequins; the poignant music by November and Alex Wilson encourages the possibilities of life beyond that door. Stick you head out. The young ensemble—lots of fresh new faces—gives him a new lease of life. And he takes it… he puts on quite the show.
I see that Charlotte Broom of HeadSpaceDance, which she founded with Christopher Akrill in 2012 and which won the Critics’ Circle Best Independent Company in 2018, is the rehearsal director. Quality all round.