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. But at the core of the dance is not a mere ‘guess-the-reference’ game — even though the quotations from Apollo, Serenade, Who Cares? are literally in your face — but a far more complex and typically Forsythian web of challenges to tradition, conventions and vocabulary. The conventional centrality of the duet is thus questioned by diverting the viewer’s attention on to an array of actions that contrast with and, at the same time, complement the duet itself. Similarly, the use of canon sequences — a fundamental of choreography — is displaced through a series of ‘breaking down’ moments that might surprise or even annoy the viewer. In my opinion, this is not one of Forsythe’s most innovative creations, as it overindulges in ideas that have already been made famous by his other far more provocative choreographies. Yet the work introduced some well-considered thematic continuity to the programme; the splendid performance of Scottish Ballet’s dancers, furthermore, obliterated the work’s numerous structural flaws, injecting new life into a piece that would otherwise look slightly dated.
The dancers’ stylistic malleability is simply admirable, and allows them to engage with diverse choreographic genres and idioms with chameleonic ability. A quality that remained evident in the third and final item of the programme, In Light and Shadow, created in 2000 by Krzysztof Pastor to a selection of Bach’s compositions. Not unlike the Forsythe piece, Pastor’s ballet came across well, thanks to the breathtakingly attuned participation of the dancers. It is a nice work, which provides the whole company with an ideal vehicle to show technical as well as interpretative qualities. It concluded a well-devised evening on a high and cheerful note, making viewers long to see more of this unique 40-year-old company.
Comments