Royal ballet

Dance review: Raven Girl, Symphony in C

Last Friday, ballet’s overcrowded aviary welcomed a new addition: Raven Girl.  Sexy, sleek, troubled and troublesome, she is the creation of the bestselling author Audrey Niffenegger and Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor.  Expectations were high, as McGregor is not a choreographer one would normally associate with balletic storytelling. The work, with stunning designs by Vicki Mortimer, splendid lighting by Lucy Carter, great video design by Ravi Deepres and a lusciously seductive score by Gabriel Yared, enthrals the senses and sits perfectly with McGregor’s vision of a creatively synergetic unity of the arts. It’s a pity that neither the choreo-graphy nor the dramaturgy were as impressive. The problem, a typical

Visual pleasure

According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. Well, his work is certainly a pleasant sensory experience. Neat patterns of colour, possibly recalling the chakras or energy centres that, in Eastern philosophy, govern our senses and feelings, mark the sections of this one-hour dance. The undeniable prowess of the nine handsome black male dancers with their superbly co-ordinated movements, derived from a mix of idioms, adds