Author: R Lee Source Wikipedia Creative Commons Licence
Ever since George Osborne MP delivered his Autumn Statement for 2014 I have been beating the drum for the Factory arts and cultural centre as a centre for dance in Manchester (see Let's bring the Royal Ballet to The Factory Manchester11 Dec 2014, The Factory begins to take shape26 Nov 2015 and Thanks George8 Dec 2015). Yesterday, Manchester International Festival ("MIF") announced that it had obtained planning permission to build the arts complex as part of the redevelopment of the St John's district of Manchester (see MIF announced as operator for Factory).
According to the Festival's website:
"MIF will be the operator for Factory, creating a year-round programme of work and running the building, which is due to open 2020. Factory will give audiences the opportunity to enjoy the broadest range of art forms and cultural experiences – including dance, theatre, music, opera, visual arts, spoken word, popular culture and innovative contemporary work incorporating multiple media and technologies"
MIF has commissioned dance before. In 2015 it commissioned Wayne McGregor's Tree of Codes which was premiered at the Manchester Opera House on 3 July 2015 and is to be performed this year at the Palais Garnier, the Musikhuset in Aarhus and Sadler's Wells. Last year it facilitated Akram Khan's Giselle which the MIF's artistic director described as “an example of the sort of collaboration we can expect to find at The Factory” (see Verity Williams MIF’s Giselle at The Palace Theatre, preview: Dancing to a different tune15 Dec 2016 creativetourist.com).
While I was not exactly bowled over by Akram Khan's GiselleI applaud MIF's commitment to dance. Now that we shall have a 1,600 seat auditorium for Manchester there is no reason why the second city of the UK should not host its own world class resident ballet company. Ideally, I should like to revive plans for a Northern home for the Royal Ballet which the last Labour government had proposed. If that is not possible we may have to build one ourselves from the ground up. We shall see.
I say "attempted" because the transmission broke down 6 minutes into the discussion and I did not get it back until half way through. Also, when it did come back the sound quality was appalling which meant that I struggled to hear Icke at all because he spoke very softly and I could not hear any of the questions from the floor at all. Having said that, it was certainly better than nothing and I managed to make a few notes here and there.
The discussion had been prompted by Akram Khan's Giselle which I reviewed for this blog (see Akram Khan's Giselle28 Sept 2016). That production has not yet opened in London. I could not help thinking that it might have been better to hold the discussion in one of the cities in which Akram Khan's work has already been performed or at least to have postponed the discussion until after 19 Nov when it will have finished its London run.
I should also add that Northern Ballet has held events like yesterday's and while the first of these was all over the shop (see My Thoughts on Saturday Afternoon's Panel Discussion at Northern Ballet21 June 2015) the second was much better (see Tell Tale Steps 217 June 2016). Wisely Crompton began by asking each of the panellists to define "classical". So far as I could hear what he said, Icke seemed to define classic in terms of live and dead and that a classic was something dead and Rojo said she agreed, Sutherland considered what classic meant in terms of music and talked about heritage and techniques. Evans said he had actually looked up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary ...... and then the transmission was lost.
That was a pity because the discussion was just getting interesting at that point. In a sense, Giselle is not a classical work at all but a romantic one. I don't know whether anybody mentioned that distinction in London while they were offline but, if they did not do so, maybe they should have done because giving rein to free expression is one of the characteristics of romanticism.
The transmission resumed in the middle of a comparison of Skeaping's Giselle with Akram Khan. Rojo said the timing had been deliberate because she wanted her audience to compare the two. Ideally she would have run them on alternate nights. I think she was right to have done that. As I said in English National Ballet's other Giselle22 Oct 2016, I plan to watch that show in the New Year. Surprisingly, Rojo said that she had faced some resistance to premiering Akram Khan's Giselle in Manchester. Personally, I think that was a good choice. The performance was received rapturously in the Palace on the first night. Possibly better than it would have been received in London where audiences would have seen other Giselles. There was no time for questions from the internet audience which was a pity. I would have suggested that there are other more plausible updates of Giselle such as Mats Ek's and that you don't have to change the score or story to make a work relate to modern audiences. But I don't want to be too negative. Commissioning Akram Khan was a bold decision and in that I support the company 100%. We do need to try out new things if ballet is to retain its popularity and relevance.
"Ballet, and art, has the potential of interpretation and reinterpretation, and this is vital to drive our art form forward. My vision for English National Ballet has been to introduce new works that push the boundaries of ballet, for both the Company and audiences, while at the same time honouring and reinvigorating traditional works that have become so loved over the years.”
The topic was discussed briefly on BBC Radio 4's Front Row by the critic, Luke Jennings, and the Artistic Director of Northern Ballet, David Nixon. I mentioned their conversation in Of Bikes and Buses25 Oct 2016. I applaud Tamara Rojo's aspiration though I am not persuaded that Akram Khan's Giselle achieved it (see (Akram Khan's Giselle28 Sept 2016).
However, there will be an opportunity to consider the topic in more detail tonight in a panel discussion between Tamara Rojo and Gavin Sutherland of English National Ballet, Robert Icke, the Almeida Theatre's Associate Director and Mark Evans of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The event is restricted to Friends and Patrons of the company but the discussion will be live streamed via its Facebook page from 19:30 this evening. Further information is available in the blog article which I have mentioned.
The post adds that although attendance at the meeting is restricted to Friends and Patrons members of the public can ask a question via twitter:
"The discussion will also conclude with a Q&A, so we are asking anyone that has a question for the panel to tweet us using #AskENB handling us in (@ENBallet)."
This is a topic that interests me greatly and I am very grateful to English National Ballet for arranging this discussion and opening it up to the public through Facebook. Readers will know that I mentioned the topic again very recently in my review of Darius James and Amy Doughty's Romeo a Juliet which is a work that does meet Tamara Rojo's objective in my judgment (see A Romeo and Juliet for our Times 7 Nov 2016). In that review I also mentioned David Dawson's Swan Lake for Scottish Ballet which also got it right and Ted Brandsen's Coppelia for the Dutch National Ballet which I have not yet seen but also seems to work. I do not know whether any of the panellists have seen any of those works or whether any of the creators of any of those ballets can listen to tonight's discussion but I do hope so.
I shall certainly be listening and I may well tweet a question if I get an opportunity. Finally, as I have been following ENB since 1955 I really ought to become one of its Friends soon. I love the company at least as much as I do any other.
I wanted to like Akram Khan's Giselle for English National Ballet so much. I love that company having followed it for ever since I was first taken to the Festival Hall to see The Nutcracker as a child some 60 years ago. As I said in Manchester's Favourite Ballet Company29 Nov 2015 the company danced its first ballet in Manchester on 5 Feb 1951 and I am mindful of the compliment that ENB has paid my native city by premiering an important new work there. I am glad that virtually the entire audience (or so it seemed from my position in the centre stalls) was able to give it a standing ovation - though I was not one of those who stood.
Now I have to choose my words very carefully for I don't want to condemn a work that has much merit with faint praise. There was some exciting, energetic and in the final duet between Giselle and Albrecht, quite beautiful dancing. Vicenzo Lamagna wrote, and Gavin Sutherland orchestrated, an interesting score with frequent allusions to Adolphe Adam's. Equally interesting were Tim Yip's designs. Two of my favourite dancers, Alina Cojocaru and Isaac Hernández, danced Giselle and Albtrcht and there were other favourites in other roles. The dancers worked hard contorting their bodies in unusual shapes and positions. The courou on pointe by Stina Quagebeur, who danced Myrtha, and the corps at the beginning of Act II must have been exhausting and for some excruciating.
I am glad I saw the work. I hope to see it again and perhaps pick up some of the nuances that my companion (who is of Gujarati heritage) appreciated but which passed me by. I recommend it. It was a good show - though not a great one - and it certainly was not one that swept me to my feet in the way that Brandsen did with Mata Hari (see Brandsen's Masterpirce14 Feb 2016), Maillot with his Shrew (see Bolshoi's Triumph - The Taming of the Shrew4 Aug 2016), Dawson with his Swan Lake (see Dawson's Swan Lake comes to Liverpool 29 May 2016) or Meisner with his No Time Before Time (see Dutch National Ballet's Opening Night Gala - Improving on Excellence8 Sept 2016) earlier this year.
To understand my critique of this work it is worth looking at The Storyon the special website that ENB has created for this ballet. At first sight it is Gautier's libretto with a modern twist - perhaps closer to that version than the Dance Theatre of Harlem's Creole Giselleand certainly Mats Ek's for the Paris Opera - but it does not unfold that way. In Gauthier's libretto, which is explained so beautifully in the following Dutch language
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animation, the story builds. The audience can understand Hilarion's hostility towards Albrecht which is the only reason why he has to die. In Ruth Little's version that hostility is taken as read. The scene opens in the factory with Albrecht seeking out Giselle. Hardly any of the cues - the hiding of the sword, the picking of the petals, Giselle's heart tremor and so on - remain. Surprisingly there is still the dance of the vignerons where Giselle playfully runs from Albrecht as the dancers wheel round stage but it seems to serve no obvious purpose in Little's version. It is the absence of those cues that prompts my companion's question "Why does Hilarion have to die in act II?" As she said, he has done nothing wrong. Or at least he was not half as bad as Albrecht who seduced Giselle and then abandoned her for Bathilde. In Gautier's libretto there is a logic. In Little's it seems so unfair.
As I wrote in Reflections on Giselle 29 Jan 2014 I have problems with the second act. I have to treat it as though it were an abstract work by Balanchine in order to sit through it. In reworking Giselle the creative team had a golden opportunity to ditch the superstition as Ek did by settling act II in a psychiatric hospital. Had they done something like that it might have strengthened the show but they kept it spooky. However. Khan's choreography for act II was quite different. Instead of those mesmerizing arabesques as the corps crosses the stage the girls couroured on pointe for what for them must have seemed ages. Instead of forcing their victims to dance themselves to death through exhaustion the wilis dispatched them with sticks to the accompaniment of grinding and crackly noises. Instead of facing the whole company of wilis Giselle had only to fend off Myrtha who stood scowling with her stick as Giselle danced with Albrecht for the last time.
That final duet was for me the most beautiful part of the ballet and also the most impressive. At one point Hernandez held Cojocaru by the legs and she seemed to revolve in the hold in a most amazing fashion. That last dance is what I most want to see again. With some ballets it is only a single pas de deux that survives in a company's repertoire and perhaps that will be the case with this duet.
My companion and I discussed the sticks on the drive home. "Were they supposed to be tasers?" I asked myself. Whether intended or not they were the only allusion to the Sub-Continent that registered with me for they reminded me of the sticks carried in a Punjabi folk dance that I had seen at a Bhangra festival in Huddersfield Town Hall some years ago. My companion, who is fortunate enough to have grown up in two cultures, told me that there was so much more in the rhythms of the music and the dancers' steps.
My all abiding impression of the work was unremitting darkness. Dark in two senses. Every scene was very dimly lit. So dark that I could not recognize the faces of the dancers until the reverence. I had been looking out for Sarah Kundi who is one of my favourites - but I never saw her until that curtain call. However, my companion recognized Sarah from her movements that were quite different from those of the other dancers - perhaps because of her heritage, my companion suggested. Even darker than the lighting, however. was the story for it was one of constant grind. At least in the traditional Giselle there are some happy bits such as the crowning of Giselle as harvest queen. There was nothing like than in Khan's. Just a morose folk dance for the landlords who were heralded by blasts that sounded like factory sirens or perhaps fog horns. Very intense and just a little depressing.
How does Giselle compare to Khan's other work? I regret that I have not seen much of it but of the works that I have seen I much prefer Ka'ash (see Akram Khan's Kaash - contemporary meets Indian classical7 Oct 2015) and indeed Dust which was the highlight of last year's triple bill (see Lest we forget25 Nov 2015). However, as my friend said "Giselle is a work in progress that can only improve." She did get up to applaud at the end of the show and shouted "Go on Akram!" Maybe in time I shall be able to do the same.
Standard You Tube Licence Akram Khan's Giselle will open in Manchester on 27 Sept though there will be previews on the 23 and 24.
English National Ballet and the Palace Theatre have published the synopsis. It is much closer to the traditional story than I had feared but it is still very different. Post industrial utopia or rather Dystopia rather than the Vosges or Rhineland. The score by Vincenzo Lamagna is said to follow Adam but the soundtrack to the videos sounds quite different to me.
It will open with Alina Cojocaru and Isaac Hernandez in the leading roles. Hernandez was with the Dutch National Ballet where he won the Alexandra Radius prize. I last saw Cojocaru in Romeo and Juliet in the round on 14 July 2014.
The English National Ballet has a special website for Akram Khan's Giselle and a huge programme of events in Manchester and around the country. Several of the best take place on the 18 September.
Though I feel the same kind of trepidation as I would if an old friend were to undergo surgery I know that Tamara Rojo loves Giselle at leastas much as I do and knows it so much better.
So I trust her to keep faith with it and her great company and save our dear friend. I really do.
As a Mancunian I am immensely proud that the company which is now England's national ballet company danced its first performance at the Opera House on 5 Feb 1951 (see Our Historyon English National Ballet's website). The company has chosen our city again to premiere Akram Khan's Giselle on 27 Sept 2016 before taking the work on a tour of the rest of the nation. There is enormous affection in this city for English National Ballet which I noted in Manchester's Favourite Ballet Company29 Nov 2015).
I was delighted to learn yesterday from Tamara Rojo herself that our pride and affection is reciprocated. She had tweeted:
So proud to be able to present two Giselles in one season! Great testament to brilliance of our dancers @ENBallethttps://t.co/dBIoCtXPHr
A number of events will be held around the country in connection with this important new work including some in Manchester (see the Take Part page of the company's website). There is also a fascinating dialogue between Akram Khan and Tamara Rojo on Re-imagining Giselleand Ballet Meets Kathak: the traditions behind Akram Khan's Giselle.
Having just completed in Manchester as it happens a 3-day intensive workshop on La Bayadere which is set in Hyderabad (see La Bayadère Intensive Day 1:16 Aug 2016 Day 217 Aug 2016 Day 3 17 Aug 2016) I should love to see how a choreographer from the Sub-Continent would reinterpret that work. I tentatively suggest that ballet which is not well known in this country as subject matter for a future collaboration between Akram Khan and our national company.
If I get a chance to ask a question at tonight's Tell Tale Steps #2 I shall ask the panel which includes Northern Ballet's artistic director, David Nixon, about reinterpreting well known ballets. The thought occurred to me while writing about Akram Khan's Giselle, but Nixon can talk about the subject too as he reinterpreted Swan Lakeand created a completely different version of The Sleeping Beauty which he called A Sleeping Beauty Tale.
That ballet was described as "A Sleeping Beauty Tale for the twenty-first century…" According to Northern Ballet's website:
"Aurora's birth brings a fragile peace between two neighbouring planets. When the peace is shattered on her wedding day, the only man to truly love her must undertake a life-threatening quest to prevent beauty being lost forever."
It was a full length ballet with a running time of 2 hours and 30 minutes. Nixon used Tchaikovsky's music arranged by John Longstaff. Sets and costumes were designed by Jéerôme Kaplan, lighting by Olivier Oudiou and Nixon collaborated with Patricia Doyle on the libretto.
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All being well I shall be in the audience for the premiere of Akram Khan's Giselleon 27 Sept 2016. This is billed as "a new interpretation" of Giselle which is one of my favourite ballets and the one of the world's most popular. I have not taken too kindly to most "new interpretations" of Swan Lake which is my other favourite and the other classical ballet that is at least as popular as Giselle so why am I so excited about Akram Khan's Giselle?
One reason for my excitement is that I don't really like the story of Giselle as it stands. In my Reflections on Giselle28 Jan 2014 I wrote that the reason I have a problem with Giselle is the story. Not so much Act I which, as I said in my note, could have come from The Archers but Act II , I continued:
"because Giselle is buried in unconsecrated ground where her spirit joins those of other women who have been seduced and die before their wedding day. They have it in for men and if any man is unfortunate enough to stray across their path as the gamekeeper did they kill him (though having said that I have seen one performance, though I cannot remember which company, where the gamekeeper survives and the curtain falls on his shaking hands with the playboy). That is a pretty unpleasant as well as fantastic story and offends my sensibilities ....."
My strategy for coping with Act II is to put the narrative out of my mind and to treat that part of the work as a purely abstract work like Act II of Balanchine's Jewels.
English National Ballet are not giving anything away about Akram Khan's creation. They have posted a synopsis page on their website but all it contains are a series of quotations. There is a film and some photos but they could have come from lots of rehearsals. We know that Adam's score is to be used but we are told that the score has been adapted and that there will be some additional music by Ben Frost. We also know that Akram Khan is working with Ruth Little, the dramaturg who collaborated with Jonathan Watkins on 1984.
One clue that I do have comes from Simon Garner who dances with me at KNT. Simon recently exhibited a mixed media work which included some sound effects at London Scottish House in Manchester (see Images of Giselle20 May 2016). Someone from ENB visited the exhibition and saw the work and sent a message that he had parts of the ballet were not unlike his work.
Akram Khan's Giselle will start in Manchester and will tour Bristol and Southampton before ending in Sadler's Wells in November. I should add that the company will also dance Mary Skeeping's Giselle at the Coliseum in January.
I have said before that English National Ballet has a special affinity with Manchester (Manchester's Favourite Ballet Company29 Nov 2015). The company danced its first show there and it has chosen Manchester to launch Akram Khan's Giselle). I got an opportunity to mention those thoughts to Dame Beryl Gray at the 70th anniversary celebration at the London Ballet Circle and she confirmed that they were not without justification. Quite apart from the link between the company and our city Dame Beryl expressed a personal affection for Manchester which I as a Mancunian fully reciprocate.
A practical example of the link between English National Ballet and Manchester is the brief that the company gave to a group of students of Manchester School of Art to create works of art on themes related to the ballet such as "underworld" and "dislocation". The students displayed their work at a special exhibition at London Scottish House in Manchester last weekend. One of those students is Simon Garner, a member of my adult ballet class at KNT, so I trundled down to Mount Street to take a look.
Simon had chosen "Underworld" for his theme and he had produced a mixed media work based on sound and light that conjured up the eerie world of the wilis. Visitors to this world had to enter an enclosure where they experienced quite unearthly sounds and images produced by the rustling of fabrics, the lighting and projections. There was briefly one recognizably human form which turned out to be Simon but all the other images were disembodied and ethereal.
Simon knows Giselle and the source of his inspiration was obvious. The same could not be said for most of the artists. Many of their works were interesting and some were good but the connection with story was tenuous in the extreme. One showed a lot of blood and gore which had far more in common with Liam Scarlett's Frankensteinthan Giselle. I found one student who had seen a YouTube clip and another who vaguely knew the story but that was about it. Having said that, Simon told me that the students had been encouraged to think outside the box which in my humble opinion is fine just so long as the existence of the box is acknowledged.
The exhibition covered several floors of an extensive office block which had once been the head office of one of the leading law firms in Manchester. Giselle was just one of many themes and the exhibition as a whole was impressive. I particularly liked the "museum of girlhood" on the fourth floor. The Unit X website gives some idea of the range and quality of the exhibited work and this is just one discipline of one of the finest art schools in the country.
To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 1964 Sir Frederick Ashton created The Dream. Antoinette Sibley was Titania and Anthony Dowell her Oberon, The Dream was one of the most beautiful ballets that Ashton ever created. Here is a snippet of the original production and another to a more recent performance by American Ballet Theatre with Alessandra Ferri and Ethan Stiefel. The ballet was part of a triple bill of works inspired by Shakespeare. The others were Kenneth MacMillan's Images of Loveand Sir Robert Helpmann's Hamlet. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death the Birmingham Royal Ballet will revive this iconic work at the Hippodrome between the 17 and 20 Feb 2016. If you see only one ballet this year this is the one you should not miss.
This is not the only contribution of the Birmingham Royal Ballet to the anniversary commemorations. The company will dance its Romeo and Julietthe following week in Birmingham before taking it on tour to the Lowry, Sunderland, Nottingham and Plymouth. The Northern touring section of the company will take pas de deux from Romeo and Juliet, The Dream and The Taming of the Shrew together with Wink, a new work by Jessica Lang and the Moor's Pavane to Durham, York and Shrewsbury on its Shakespeare Midscale Tour.
The Birmingham Royal Ballet's final contribution to the anniversary commemorations will be The Shakespeare Triple Billconsisting of Wink, The Moor's Pavane and David Bintley's The Shakespeare Suite at the Hippodrome between the 22 and 25 June 2016.
As Birmingham is just over 30 miles from Stratford on Avon and in the same historic country it is perhaps fitting that the Birmingham Royal Ballet should lead those commemorations but it is by no means the only company to dance works inspired by Shakespeare. The Royal Ballet will revive The Winter's Talein Spring. The Bolshoi will bring their version of The Taming of the Shrewby Jean-Cristophe Maillot to music by Shostakovich to London in the Summer (see Bolshoi Ballet to return to the Royal Opera House in summer 201611 Nov 2015 on the Royal Opera House website:
Bolshoi Ballet's Taming of the Shrew, Standard YouTube Licence
Yesterday I chose Scottish Ballet as my company of the year (see Highlights of 201529 Dec 2015) and they will certainly be in contention for the 2016 title if David Dawson'sSwan Lakeis as good as I expect it to be. Dawson is Associate Artist to the Dutch National Ballet and was its resident choreographer between 2004 and 2012. I saw his Empire Noir in the Dutch National Ballet's Cool Britannia triple bill and was most impressed (see Going Dutch29 June 2015 and David Dawson's Empire Noir18 June 2015). Swan Lake will open in Glasgow on 19 April 2016 and will visit Newcastle between 11 and 14 May 2016 and Liverpool between 1 and 4 June 2016 as well as Aberdeen, Inverness and Edinburgh.
Another new work to which I look forward immensely is Akram Khan's Giselle for English National Ballet. This work will be premièred at the Palace on 27 Sept 2016 and will be the centre piece of the Manchester International Festival. Having seen Kaash at the Lowry (see Akram Khan's Kaash - contemporary meets Indian classical7 Oct 2015) and Dust at the Palace (see Lest We Forget25 Oct 2015) I am intrigued. After Manchester the company will take the work to Bristol, Southampton and London.
Looking across the North Sea I tip Ted Brandsen'sMata Harifor the Dutch National Ballet(see Mata Hari30 Nov 2015) and Ballet Bubblesthe new season for the Durch National Ballet's Junior Company. The programme will include new works by Ernst Meisner and Charlotte Edmonds as well as pieces by Krzysztof Pastor, David Dawson and my favourite living choreographer Hans van Manen. Sadly the company will be unable to perform at the Linbury this year because it is closed for renovation. I have tried to persuade the company to consider other theatres in the UK but I am not confident that I have been successful. Other shows I should really like to see include Hans van Manen's Goldwhich will tour the Netherlands and Sasha Watts's Romeo and Julietto Berlioz;s score. Incidentally, if like me you are a van Manen fan but can't make it to the Netherlands you can see Birmingham Royal Ballet dance his Five Tangostogether with Solitaire, Four Scottish Dances and Monotones II in Cheltenham, Poole or Truro. I saw Scottish Ballet's performance of Five Tangos last April and enjoyed it very much (see No Mean City - Accessible Dance and Ballet 26 April 2016),
While it may not be possible to welcome the Junior Company to England this year we can at least look forward to visits by the Australian Ballet and the Bolshoi. The Australians are bringing Graeme Murphy's Swan Lake and Alexei Ratmansky's Cinderellato the Coliseum in July. The Bolshoi are bringing Maria Alexandrova, Ekaterina Krysanova, Olga Smirnova, Svetlana Zakharova, Semyon Chudin, David Hallberg, Denis Rodkin and others to delight us and will performDon Quixote, Swan Lake, The Flames of Paris and Le Corsaire as well as Maillot's Taming of the Shrew which I mentioned earlier.
I am aware that I have barely scratched the surface and I apologize for any omissions. On the eve of what promises to be an outstanding year for dance I wish all my readers a happy and prosperous new year.
When completed the Factory will host the Manchester International Festival which featured artists from the Paris Opera Ballet in Wayne McGregor's Tree of Codesthis year. Next year it will première Akram Khan's Gisellefor English National Ballet. Manchester which is visited regularly by the Birmingham Royal Ballet, English National Ballet and Northern Ballet as well as smaller companies is probably the biggest audience for dance outside London.
So we now have an audience for dance and we will soon have a major venue for the performing arts in the city. All we need now is a major resident company. As I hinted last year we would welcome the Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet with open arms if it wanted to resume the negotiations for a Northern home which were terminated by the change of government last year.
Or we could build out own. Some of the building blocks are here. We have the Northern Ballet School in Oxford Road which already has its own performing company known as Manchester City Ballet. It will perform Giselleat The Dancehouse between 10 and 12 Dec 2015. There is also the Centre for Advanced Training in Dance at The Lowry. All we need is to commitment and money.
English National Ballet, Lest we Forget Palace Theatre, Manchester, 24 Nov 2015
Yesterday's performance of Lest we Forget inManchester was superb. It was not an easy watch and for that reason I can't say that I enjoyed it but I was moved by it in a very special way. This was ballet at its best. It showed the unique power of dance to comprehend and find beauty in one of the greatest tragedies of human history. The end of the performance brought some members of the audience to their feet. I guess the only reason why more did not join in was that the audience was emotionally drained by the end.
The performance consisted of Liam Scarlett'sNo Man's Land, Russell Maliphant's Second Breath and Akram Khan's Dust. That was a shorter programme than the one premièred at the Barbican last year in that it omitted George Williamson's Firebird which I hope to see one day. All three were impressive works but the one that stood out for me was Scarlett's No Man's Land.
I had already seen a recording of Scarlett's Viscera earlier in the month (see Au Revoir but not Adieu19 Nov 2015) and was keen to compare it to No Man's Land. The two works could not have been more different. Set to excerpts from Franz Liszt's Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses that had been arranged by Gavin Sutherland No Man's Land was haunting and lyrical. The work remembered not only the men who served in the forces but the women who stayed behind to make the munitions in appalling and sometimes dangerous conditions. The setting for this work was a damaged but still operational building - possibly a factory or maybe a ruin on the front. The women were in simple flowing dresses. The men in green or brownish tunics with steel helmets at one point in the ballet. There was enchanting dancing by Begoña Cao, Junor Souza, Alison McWhinney,Fabian Reimair, Shiori Kase and Fernando Bufalá.
Maliphant's Second Breath was an opportunity for Tamarin Stott and Joshua McSherry-Gray to shine and they were incandescent in their duet though the supporting dancers were important too. The work was set to a score by Andy Cowton but not easy to absorb. There were pulses of sound that I found quite alarming though that was possibly the composer's idea. There were snatches of barely audible and even less comprehensible speech in the piece followed by a pretty clear rendering of Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night which seemed to be delivered by the author himself. Dark and disturbing this was the work that required most work on the part of the audience.
The most dramatic work of the evening was Khan's Dust. It began with an execution - or possibly the nightmare of an execution for the victim continued to writhe on the ground. There was some impressive human sculpture where the dancers' limbs became waves or possibly a production line. It was Khan's Kaashat the Lowry that prompted me to book for Lest we Froget but this work was very different in that any South Asian influences were much less noticeable to me at an rate. The music for this work was by Jocelyn Pook who also wove speech into her score. There was what seemed to be a phrase of Auld Lang Syne repeating itself on a scratched record. The lead dancers were Erina Takahashi with Reinar and Bufala, This piece won Khan a number of awards last year and its success seems to have led to his commission to create a Giselle. I look forward to it immensely.
The centenary of the First World War inspired the Royal New Zealand Ballet to create Salute, another mixed bill focusing in war. They two of their ballets from that production to Leeds which I reviewed in Kia Ora! The Royal New Zealand Ballet in Leeds5 Nov 2015 earlier this month. The Netherlands which was neutral in the conflict is commemorating the war in a different way with Ted Brandsen's Mata Hariwho was also a victim of that conflict.
Anyone who thinks that dance is a frivolous, frothy superficial art form incapable of dealing with difficult matters should think again. It is the synthesis of many arts and the whole is almost always greater than the constituent parts.
Footage from World Ballet Day, English National Ballet's rehearsal of Akram Khan's Dust, Embedded under YouTube standard licence
Having been bowled over by Kaash on Tuesday night (see Akram Khan's Kaash - contemporary meets Indian classical 7 Oct 2015) I am keen to see more of Akram Khan's work. I shall get my chance when English National Ballet perform Dust as part of Lest We Forgettriple bill in Manchester on 24 Nov 2015. I got a taster of the work this morning when I watched the above clip from World Ballet Day. The dancers are Erina Takahashi and James Streeter.
It will be interesting to compare Lest We Forget with the Royal New Zealand Ballet's Dear Horizon by Andrew Simmons and Paschendale by Neil Ieremia which also commemorate the First World War. These will be performed in Leeds as part of The Anatomy of a Passing Cloud programme on 3 and 4 Nov 2015,
Akram Khan Company, Kaash, The Lowry, 6 Oct 2015
Watching the Akram Khan Company's Kaash is one of the most exhilarating theatrical experiences I know. Its dancers can contort their bodies into almost unimaginable shapes and they can move around the stage like bats out of hell. For 50 minutes I was totally absorbed with the sounds and movement. Alternating periods of sound and silence. Corresponding stillness and explosions of energy on stage.
The performance starts with a Sung Hoon Kim alone on stage. He stands with his back to the audience in silence with the house lights on. Then darkness as the other dancers enter. The men are stripped to the waste in what appear to be black chiffon trousers. The women are also in black with tunics over leggings their costumes reminding me of shakwar kameez. They performed before a backdrop consisting of a black rectangle framed in red. The score consisted of percussion, fragments of speech including phrases in English, something that resembled the roar of an aircraft engine which was almost deafening followed by blessed silence. It was during the silences that the most delicate movements occurred. There were delicate hand movements which I surmised to be derived from or at least inspired by Kathak dance. The performance ended as suddenly as it began with the lights suddenly cut and the stage in silence. Then wild applause and ululations.
According to the Lowry's websiteKaash means "if only" in Hindi and that was reflected with such muffled phrases as "if only I had bought two instead of one" whispered on stage. Apparently
“Hindu Gods, black holes, Indian time cycles, tablas, creation and destruction” were the starting points for this work ........ Khan’s quest to build bridges between the worlds of contemporary dance and the Indian classical dance form Kathak."
Almost certainly I lost many of those allusions viewing the work from an Anglo-Saxon perspective.
................. I think I'd spend a lot of my time in Danceworks. I doubt if I'd ever get any work done. My long suffering clerk would suck his teeth and lament "We see less of you now than when you were in Yorkshire, Miss."
Because there is so much happening at that studio.
First, there is a talk by Ed Watson on 10 Feb 2015 between 19:15 and 20:45. I'm also giving a talk that earlier day (though on a very different topic at a different venue) but I shall be in town so will be able to hear him. Tickets are now sold out but there is a waiting list. Here is a link to the Royal Ballet's YouTube clip on The Winter's Tale where he discusses his role as Leontes.
Post Script
5 Feb 2015 Yesterday I found myself at a networking event in Upper Grosvenor Street which is not much more than an few grands jetés away from Balderton Street so I moseyed on over to pay Danceworks a visit. There were some very nice people of the front desk who invited me to take a peep at the classes. There seemed to be street, jazz and some kind of stretching exercises while I was there. They all seemed a lot if fun. Had I brought my shoes and leotard I would definitely have joined in. Had I not had a train to catch I would have bought myself a Danceworks t-shirt and leggings from Selfridges and danced in bare feet. I am looking forward to returning on the 10 Feb to see Ed Watson and to taking my first class on Sunday 15 Feb.
