One long moan of woe: Crystal Pite’s Light of Passage, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised imagery, it proposed two ways of interpreting the horrific footage of the refugee crisis of 2016: either as a matter of anonymous, voiceless masses, portrayed as a body of dancers moving across the stage like a skein of migrating swallows beyond reason or control; or as a ragtag of desperate, furious individuals with every dignity and possession taken from them – somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s daughter or son, fighting for survival – a plight conveyed in the impassioned dancing of Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally.

Five years on, Pite has returned to flesh out this fierce and powerful half-hour work with two further sections: one focused on the young, the other on the elderly, and a note of sentimentality has crept in. Six children (junior pupils of the Royal Ballet School) dressed in white, vulnerable and innocent, are supported, shielded and lifted by phalanxes of adults, but it is never clear what they are being protected from. An ageing couple are separated by death – so what’s new? – as other younger couples enact the idea of inter-dependence in brief duets. There are moments, indeed whole passages, of expressively sculpted beauty in this, but just not enough substance to make it more than weepy.

Yet the deeper problem for me is Pite’s choice of score – Gorecki’s ‘transcendent’ Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which is used as an atmospheric backdrop rather than something which charges the dance with energy or shape. Gorecki deals in orchestral sludge, and his dreary Symphony lacks any variety of colour or pulse. Throughout its hour-long duration, it exhales one sapless moan of woe and as it drones meanderingly on, Pite is obliged to drone on too, gradually losing her compass, running out of ideas and finishing up swirling in mere fug.