Star quality | 10 October 2009

Scottish Ballet: 40th Anniversary Season
Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Scottish Ballet has been frequently praised for its stylistically impeccable and theatrically superb renditions of George Balanchine’s works. It is thus more than fitting that the company’s 40th-anniversary programme kicks off with Rubies, the sparkling central section of Jewels, his acclaimed 1967 triptych.

Rubies, which is often performed on its own, highlights and encompasses the best of the Balanchinian choreographic aesthetic. Dazzling, jazzy ideas, representing the American culture that the Russian-born dance-maker wanted to embrace, develop rapidly from traces of the old classical tradition which encapsulate Balanchine’s reverence for his own past and for that balletic idiom he never refuted. Yet nostalgia is never on the menu. Classical and neoclassical ideas flash rapidly amid a firework display of swaying hips, turned-in feet and humorous citations from both vaudeville and music-hall traditions. Set to Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, the ballet is also the ultimate translation of music into dance. Even the non-expert can easily detect and appreciate the complexities of the choreographic layout, which follows the score in every detail, assigning to different bodies — as well as different parts of each body — movements that ingeniously translate every musical configuration. Scottish Ballet’s dancers seem to have acquired a unique and deep understanding of and familiarity with the not-so-easy demands of Balanchine’s styles. Thanks to them, the ballet, restaged with care by Patricia Neary, came to life in all its glory, and with an attention to detail I wish other companies would aspire to.

It is a well-known fact that Balanchine’s work played a significant part in the artistic moulding of the postmodern choreographer William Forsythe. Created in 1998, and set to a haunting score by Luciano Berio, Workwithinwork is indeed full of more or less direct references to the Balanchinian repertoire.