Royal Ballet Triple: Polyphonia/ Sweet Violets/ Carbon Life, Covent Garden, April 2012

This was an entirely twenty-first century triple bill.

Polyphonia, all images by Bill Cooper

The first work, Christopher Wheeldon’s Polyphonia, set to ten piano pieces by Ligeti, was first shown in New York at the start of the century, January 2001. The large Covent Garden stage gave space to the spare minimalism of Wheeldon’s choreography, with darkness sometimes surrounding a spot for the dancers. It has the sense of a sequence of études created for four couples, and along with the pas-de-deux work there is a section for three female dancers and another for two males in contest with one another. The silences between the ten sections and the purity of the piano sound give it a contemplative feel, and it was beautifully danced. It was only spoilt by some handkerchief-less members of the audience who couldn’t control their tousserie.

Leanne Cope and Thiago Soares

Sweet Violets is such a pretty title, quite in contrast to the content of this brilliant new work by Liam Scarlett. It starts with an incident on September 11^th, 1907 when a part-time prostitute named Emily Dimmock was murdered in her own home. Her partner returned the next day to find her throat slit from ear to ear. Nothing had been taken, the motive was a mystery, and this infamous Camden Town Murder was never solved. What inspired Scarlett was a series of paintings and drawings by Walter Sickert, who specialised in portraying the deep, dark underworld of London. His role was performed with admirable understatement by Johan Kobborg, whose friend was the murderer in this take on the story. Sickert’s friend, very well portrayed by Thiago Soares, obviously has two sides to his nature, and the fight with the prostitute was wonderfully realistic as he grappled with Leanne Cope, superb as the unfortunate Emily Dimmock. But that is only the start. This is a full-length story in one act, intense, brutal, and with ramifications at the highest level.

Kobborg as Sickert and McRae as Jack

The story has been set in the late 1880s when Queen Victoria’s grandson Eddy was still alive, and Lord Salisbury was prime minister. Both or them appear here, portrayed by Federico Bonelli and Christopher Saunders, to say nothing of Jack the Ripper, played as a very sinister character by Steven McRae. Laura Morera, Alina Cojocaru and Tamara Rojo danced beautifully, the first two as historical characters, and Rojo as an alluring artist’s model. This was a fabulous performance by an all-power cast, and a senior member of the Company told me the other cast is equally terrific.

Rachmaninov’s music for piano, violin and cello was beautifully played, and John Macfarlane’s designs, with David Finn’s lighting, gave a sombre, threatening atmosphere to the whole business. The clever use at one point of a stage and audience within the stage allows us to see the backs of the performers, making it feel as if we are looking in at things we should not really see. I shall go again, and again. Scarlett’s inspired new work is worth the whole triple bill.

Carbon Life

The third item, Carbon Life was a new creation by Wayne McGregor. Like his other work it involved unusual lighting design, this time by Lucy Carter, and I loved the clever way in which the dancers at the start appeared to glow in the dark. The whole thing was in several parts, with rock music and rap performed by musicians behind the dancers. Costumes ranged from simple swimming trunks to elaborate black outfits having pointed hoods, with cross-dressing allowed. The overall impression was of a very high quality music and dance video. Fun, balletic, and full of frivolity.

Performances of this triple bill continue until April 23 — for details click here.

Le Grand Macabre, ENO, English National Opera, September 2009

This musical work by Ligeti (1923–2006) is related to opera in the way a painting by Hieronymus Bosch is related to a landscape. It seems to be about death, of both body and soul, but is a surreal work based on a 1934 drama La balade du Grand Macabre by Belgian author Michel de Ghelderode. The action takes place in a principality called Breughelland, named after the painter Pieter Brueghel, whose Triumph of Death seems to have been an inspiration. Ligeti originally wrote the music in 1975–77, collaborating on the libretto with Michael Meschke. It was written in German but intended to be flexible in its language and translated for performance. There was originally a fair amount of spoken dialogue, but much of this was removed in the revised version of 1996, which is what was performed here. Perhaps more should have gone, because some of the invective was unnecessarily unpleasant, including phrases such as ‘dog f…er’ and ‘arse l…er’. Is this really necessary in a work of art? Are there not other ways of expressing things that can carry the emotions by clever understatement? These particular phrases were uttered by the white minister and the black minister, who looked and performed like stock characters from a pantomime.

To understand this strange work I found it helpful to recall that Ligeti had shocking experiences as a young man. He was drafted into a Jewish labour battalion in 1944, and his close family was all sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Only his mother survived. The central character of the opera is Death in the person of Nekrotzar, sung here by Pavlo Hunka. His slave Piet the Pot was sung by Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, and the two lovers Amando and Amanda, who perpetually have sex together, were sung by Frances Bourne and Rebecca Botone. There is a court astronomer named Astradamors and his sadistic wife Mescalina, sung by Frode Olsen and Susan Bickley, and in the second part we meet Prince Go-Go, sung by counter-tenor Andrew Watts, and Gepopo, the chief of the secret police, sung by Susanna Anderson.

The action seems to lack a clear narrative, and I shall not go into a long exposition of the various scenes, but the production by Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco showed a variety of things going on, in and around a huge female corpse crouching on stage. The lighting by Peter van Praet was very clever as it threw some strange views on the corpse and even seemed to show its skeleton on occasion. Set designs were by Alfons Flores, and costumes, which I wasn’t wild about, by Lluc Castells. The production is being done jointly with the theatre La Monnaie in Brussels, the Gran Teatro del Liceu Barcelona, and the Teatro dell’ Opera di Roma. Baldur Brönnimann conducted and did a fine job with the orchestra. When I closed my eyes it sounded wonderful, but the grotesque action on stage was a distraction, and lovers of Ligeti might prefer a simple recording.