Canadian-born Aaron S Watkin comes to ENB as its new Artistic Director after seventeen years heading Dresden’s Semperoper Ballett, bringing a wealth of experience. Tonight’s programme is his calling card, his vision for the company, of which he was a member some thirty years ago.
With this, his first programme of his first season, he is telling us who he is and making visible his mission to mix classical, neoclassical and contemporary, but hasn't ENB always done that, embracing “a broad spectrum of dance”?
He has, impressively, brought Balanchine’s nostalgic Theme and Variations into ENB’s repertoire as well as commissioning world premières from American Andrea Miller and British David Dawson.
So, a mixed bag, and ENB dancers rise to the challenge as they always do, but it’s not a programme to raise the spirits, though it would seem so at first with Balanchine’s vivid 1947 illustration of Imperial classical style, and his precise geometric and daisy-chain framing of the lead dancers.
Tchaikovsky’s music with its theme and nine variations, written 1865–6 when he was a young man, still a student, is delightful, joyous even. The tempo is mostly fast, which does put the dancers to the test on this their first outing in it.
Thirteen glittering couples fill the stage under three glittering chandeliers, princesses in tiaras and their cavaliers, costumes colour-coded for the principals (Emma Hawes and Aitor Arrietta charming in their solos and pas de deux), demi-soloists (four couples) and the sprightly corps. Twenty-five minutes of musical pleasure from the English National Ballet Philharmonic under the baton of Gavin Sutherland.
Les Noces, Ascent to Days—notice that subsidiary title—is a misnomer. Without reading the programme notes, I think it’s an extension of The Rite of Spring (Mats Ek did his own version last year for ENB), and what do you know, it is. It certainly is not Les Noces as Bronislava Nijinska and Natalia Goncharova envisioned it a hundred years ago. Miller says she didn't want to do a wedding.
So, primitive stygian bleakness it is with two chosen ones, the younger one Francesca Velicu I remember in ENB’s Pina Bausch version of The Rite of Spring. James Streeter’s Father takes me back to his role in that, too. A black concealing sheet, with individual cut-offs, adds to the rite of passage mystery, as do the priest’s two alarmingly long swords.
Orchestration by Steven Stucky, artwork concept by the late Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023) in her unique style, flimsy costumes by Marie Cantenys and Margaux Lalanne and with the Opera Holland Park Opera Chorus in black on stage as part of the stage setting (Mark Henderson’s lighting making them appear like ornamental masks on the wall), this has a strong conceptual style.
But, it is sung in English, which is a disappointment—I don't hear that Russian folk song mournfulness in the original for the bride, a sacrifice of sorts to tradition, in her dreaded arranged marriage ritual. Miller wants to explore its effects on the community. Barlow’s input, I gather, was invaluable, as one can well imagine, and this performance is dedicated to her.
Barlow’s art installation, a crumbling, worn stone staircase at the side with its cave-like apertures into which the Mother (Alice Bellini) disappears in her grief, must once have been an amphitheatre, a meeting point. That eroded look also makes me think of stone ‘baba’ statues / stelae in Ukraine. But what her meteor mass hanging over the stage means is up to us to decipher.
David Dawson’s choreography to Richard Strauss’s song cycle Four Last Songs also feels ancient, classical this time. Twelve dancers, in nude leotards, who might have stepped out of Matisse’s La Danse, are surely from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Under a concrete museum roof with an aperture to the dark sky, they appear like bas-reliefs or a fluid frieze against a black backcloth.
Strauss is sung in German by soprano Madeleine Pierard at the side of the stage. There is a parallel text in the programme. Written when he was 84, it is a serene farewell to life. Death in my experience is never this beautiful. If only it were as in artistic imaginations, a wishful solace for those still living.
Dawson, curiously, reminds me of both Kenneth MacMillan (Requiem and Gloria—the link with the latter is also Pierard) and Wayne McGregor’s works and style. There is much running about, emoting, females carried on shoulders like effigies, and it is simply doleful. Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) also springs to mind, life’s journey.