Chilling out

The Royal Ballet’s Les Patineurs is January as you would wish it. No slush, no new-year sales, no streaming chest colds. Winter, as imagined by Frederick Ashton, is an eternal ice rink lit by Chinese lanterns hung from icing-sugar branches. Ashton’s choreography is ingenious. His dancers really do seem to glide, the boards of the stage to freeze. You believe completely that they are on skates, not slippers. The men wear sheepskin jackets, the women bonnets and polka-dot tulle. Sleigh bells ring and fresh flakes fall. The ensemble slip, slide and dance a skating conga. Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell are a Torvill-and-Dean dream in the pas de deux. Kaneko is light, flowing, sweetly flustered as her partner tips her upside-down. Yuhui Choe and Anna Rose O’Sullivan are marvels of precision and balance. Choe’s thousand-and-one spins are done with consummate control.

Marcelino Sambé, powerfully charismatic in The Nutcracker, is here the snowiest of show-off skaters. He is not tall but achieves extraordinary height in his springboard leaps and bounds. He dances with a spirit of mischief, the boy who’ll always throw the first snowball. His final series of pirouettes are a feat of physics. On a bleak midwinter night, Les Patineurs is a pleasure.

Kenneth MacMillan’s Winter Dreams is a gloomier affair. The tale is a loose adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters danced by Marianela Nunez as Masha, Itziar Mendizabal as Olga and Yasmine Naghdi as impetuous Irina. After the prettiness of Les Patineurs, Winter Dreams plays out drably against a backdrop of billiard baize with the sisters in shades of sackcloth and dish mop. The storytelling, to a score by Tchaikovsky, is subtle, unhurried, intelligent, but the choreography so pushes and shoves the sisters that they become sad and solemn dolls.