The London Handel Festival, founded in 1976, bringing five weeks of annual delight to George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) fans ever since, adds classical ballet to the mix tonight. If Louis XIV could blend the arts at Versailles, why not the Victorian Shoreditch Town Hall…
Quotes about myth projected above the stage from Aristotle, Jung and more; a vast, draped classical painting, The Course of Empire: Consummation (1835/6) by Thomas Cole; a minstrel gallery above; early music ensemble La Nuova Musica (conductor David Bates at his harpsichord) directly below and in front of us, which doesn't leave much space for the six dancers and the singers. The stall aisles are useful.
The Assembly Hall stage is not large, so all the more credit to choreographer Valento Zucchetti and director Thomas Guthrie for their tight fusion. But where to look: at the surtitles, at the fabulous orchestra under our noses, at the singers, the dancers, and the puppeteers and sceneshifters?
Handel’s cantata Apollo e Dafne (in Italian) and his oratorio The Choice of Hercules (in English), composed some forty years apart, are a marvellous pairing. The NEBT dancers (Jose Alves, Louis De Felice, Paul Meneu, Jessica Templeton, Maidie Widmer, Leila Wright), in their sleek unitards suggesting green foliage, are the consistent immortal link between the ageless two. Decorative, too.
Ovidian nymphs constitute the branches of the laurel tree Dafne metamorphoses into to escape the relentless attentions of Apollo. But what are those handheld plaster cast faces about and their bowler hats and umbrellas? I think Magritte. And the follies when they twirl them... Also Apollo’s chariot?
Baritone Dan D’Souza and soprano Lauren Lodge-Campbell battle it out in modern dress above and below, but I do wonder at the need for those side tables and dancing chairs brought on and taken away—unnecessary distracting stage business. Are they grandstanding civil servants in their respective offices, ne’er the twain shall meet? And are the dancers the subtext to their text?
The Choice of Hercules goes one better and has an effective white puppet of Hercules—head, torso and arms very classical, a fit young Hercules held (and sung) by countertenor James Hall and two puppeteers. I think of Jacob Epstein’s The Rock Drill torso sculpture.
Hall is the highlight for me—what a lovely voice. Not to detract from Samantha Clarke’s soprano Pleasure or Bethany Horak-Hallett mezzo Virtue, who battle over the young Hercules. Here the dancers come into their own, especially depicting pleasure or should that be vices… I see three graces, an enticing spirit, the men leaping and shouldering their way in like stags. Virtue is demure.
Are the dancers “ambassadors of peace” or “in bliss”; “Pleasure’s winding stream” or Virtue’s radiant beam”? Are they the curlicues of classical sculpture and nature’s wonder? The present and future readers of Hercules’s exploits—books placed in their hands? Dance eloquently complements the musical vicissitudes of mythological troubled lives. Ancient sculptures brought to life. And blessed spirits.