A common flaw in narrative ballet today is the attempt to tell stories that are too complex and ramified for the vocabulary of dance to convey. With Jonathan Watkins’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s slim novella A Single Man, the flaw is the opposite. George, a middle-aged prof, is traumatised and in mourning for his recently killed lover Jim. The consolations of ordinary life fail, but he feels the twinge of desire returning for one of his students. After they spend an erotically charged night together, he can move on. There’s just not enough in this fable to sustain 100 minutes of dance drama.
To fill this scenario out, Watkins introduces the ghost of Jim and a spectral corps de ballet, who haunt and mirror George’s grief and anxieties. Inside a neon-lit head above the stage, sits the celebrated American crooner John Grant, who at intervals contributes lugubriously introspective songs blessed with vapid lyrics such as ‘Am I now I am now’. The choreography is earth-bound, full of torsion and overtly sexual imagery. Some of it is inventive and effective – I liked its representation of a tennis match and a midnight swim – but much of it simply drifts.
One of the most striking personalities of his balletic generation, Edward Watson retired from the stage in 2021 at the height of his powers, dedicating himself to coaching his successors. Three years later, at the age of 49, he has returned to create the role of George. Blessed with a physique of rubbery suppleness and a facial expression suggestive of secret anguish, he gives a committed performance and, in movement carefully tailored to his physique, he can still cut the mustard. Jonathan Goddard is his match as the ghostly Jim, and James Hay bubbles and flirts cutely as the object of George’s fancy. Kristen McNally is criminally wasted as George’s confidante Charley. The corps doubles as unflatteringly costumed spooks and cheerfully jiving undergrads.
An ingenious set designed by Chiara Stephenson and groovy music by Jasmin Kent Rodgman are assets. But it all feels both thin and overblown, and the pathos of the older man yearning for a younger one doesn’t register with any intensity.
For We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon, the hip Marseilles-based outfit (La)Horde, with a little help from our own Rambert, occupied the foyers and auditoria of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room, licensing an audience of chic metropolitans and those of indeterminate gender to wander freely between 24 different locations and sample a mélange of live dance, installations and films.
A problem with this sort of thing is that it panders to one’s latent ADHD
A problem with this sort of thing is that it panders to one’s latent ADHD, fomenting a restless sense that there will always be something better happening in the next room. Among much else of a trivial or exiguous nature, I listlessly watched two ladies prowling around each other in an erotic striptease; a film about ghosts in an art gallery after dark; and a limo with a numberplate of ‘The Beast’ being ritually defaced with paint and graffiti. (La)Horde offered a fiercely energised display of their trademark jerky ‘popping’, choreographed to pounding dance music and punctuated by violent confrontations between the sexes. Another group in angelic white communed with Allegri’s celestial Miserere. But the only item that held my attention for more than a few minutes was a rigorously geometric invention by Lucinda Childs: dance of formal integrity, relatively conventional but exhilarating.
I sloped off after two hours of this carnival, having been somehow entertained and bored at the same time. Alas, I can offer no explanation as to how the title – a remark made by Gene Kelly to Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin – relates to anything I saw. Just sounds good, I guess.
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