Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent. Between some highlights of the most familiar Fokine repertory, an extract from Nijinska’s Les Biches has oddly been inserted, and there was nothing here to suggest the fact that Massine was by far the most dominant choreographer of the Ballets Russes’s interwar era and someone indeed who had personally worked with BRB in its previous incarnation. A missed opportunity, surely, and is it too much to hope that one day we might see classics such as La Boutique fantasque or Le Tricorne again?
BRB can draw on only modest resources. The orchestra was prerecorded, there was only the sketchiest of attempts to render the glories of Benois and Bakst’s designs, and an ensemble made up of young graduate dancers at the start of their careers had been assigned some tough stylistic challenges. One couldn’t expect them to redeem the Schéhérazade pas de deux from preposterous silent-movie camp, or to make much of the subtle, sophisticated satire of manners that underlies Les Biches.
Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile and enjoyable enterprise that delivered some spirited performances: Alisa Garkavenko threw off some thrilling grands jetés as The Firebird, Jack Easton attacked Nijinsky’s showpiece role in Le Spectre de la rose with verve, and Garkavenko and Tom Hazelby led a charming reading of Les Sylphides that had been honourably and sensitively rehearsed.
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