Inala at the Alhambra

Bradford Alhambra

Author Kaly99

Source Wikipedia

Inala, Alhambra, Bradford, 26 June 2015

On 29 Sept 2013 dancers from most of the major companies of the United Kingdom performed in a gala at Sadler's Wells for Yorkshire Ballet Summer School (see More Things I do for my Art - Autumn Gala of Dance and Song 30 Sept 2013). Rambert's contribution was Inala danced by Dane Hurst to the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. On that occasion Hurst performed to a recording of the ensemble's music. I remember that it was one of the highlifghts of the show. Less than a year later Hurst and other dancers from his company and elsewhere together with Ladysmith Black Mambazo itself and accompanying musicians appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in a full length performance of song and dance also called Inala.

The full length work was received very well. The artists were invited to the Royal Variety Performance on 13 Nov 2014. They also performed to full houses at Sadler's Wells and other venues in the UK (see About the Show on the Inala website), Earlier this month they performed in Moscow and they are now on the second leg of another UK tour which started in Oxford on 23 June 2015 (see "Tickets and Tour"). Last night I was them at the Bradford Alhambra. I hope to catch them again at Sadler's Wells on the 10 July 2015.

They certainly seem to be very popular. On Tuesday I caught a feature on Inala: Combining music from Ladysmith Black Mambazo and contemporary dance on Radio 4's Front Row in which Albert Mazibuko said that the company received standing ovations "most of the time." In the same interview Pietra Mello-Pitman, the show's executive producer who had danced in the Royal Ballet said that was something she had never received in The Sleeping Beauty no matter how beautiful.

So, what is this show like? You can get some idea from the YouTube trailer and a little more insight from  Introducing INALA - A Zulu Ballet. Singers, musicians and dancers share the same stage. There is a very simple backdrop of a wide sky against a parched landscape with three clouds that reminded me of aircraft vapour trails. The costumes are also simple. The singers appear in long shirts or tunics with geometric dancers. The male dancers are in black. The women are in black tops with different coloured skirts. There were changes of head dress.  There were feathers in the head gear that seemed to indicate different types of fowl. The backdrop changes were generated by the lighting and I have to single out Ben Cracknell for praise for some impressive lighting design.

I can't tell you much about the story because there were no programmes and hence no cast sheets. In an effort to find out why and how I could get one I introduced myself as a blogger to a chap with a North American accent who was selling DVDs in a concession booth. He told me that the programmes had been sent to Oxford. "Well Oxford, Bradford, what's the difference?" remarked my companion ironically, "They are both 'fords'." So far as I could see the show charted a day in rural South Africa with a trip to the city for there was a scene with car horns and searchlights. It ended with a sort of lullaby as the lights dimmed with the singers waving to the audience followed by a final few minutes when each of the dancers did a turn.

I have the same problem in telling you who took part in last night's show though I think I recognized Dane Hurst and some other dancers from Rambert. The best I can do in that regard is to refer you to the "Cast and Creatives" page of the show's website. I hope that the company recover their programmes from Oxford by the time I see the show again in London. I have to say that had I not seen the Yorkshire Ballet Summer School gala or heard Front Row I would have been able to say very little about this show.

The show is advertised as a "Zulu ballet" and there are indeed some balletic jumps and pas de deux but there seemed to me to be rather more contemporary dance than ballet.  There was, for example, no pointe work.  That is of course what I would have expected from a show that was choreographed by Mark Baldwin, Rambert's artistic director. Some of the biggest "oohs" and "ahs" from the audience were for jumps and lifts which you see in almost any ballet. They were well executed but not exactly out of the ordinary.

As had happened the previous night in Sheffield for The Car Man (see Motoring 25 June 2015) there was a standing ovation and a lot of whooping and cheering with which I did not join in. I thought it was good but not all that good. The idea of combining singing and dancing is not new. Bintley's Carmina Burana last Saturday - which I have still to review - was miles better in that regard (see In Praise of Bintley 21 June 2015). Neither is putting the musicians on stage. MacMillan did it more elegantly with Elite Syncopations. I think that this was the first time many members of the audience had seen grands jetés and tours en l'air and ballet could generate that sort of enthusiasm with the public if it were better marketed.

The element of the show that I most enjoyed was the singing which was magnificent. I recommend the show for that alone. There were also touches of humour. There was a sequence when the dancers attempted a jump. One pretended to clutch his thigh in agony. Another just gesticulated his refusal to try something so unwise. It was good entertainment and I shall report on the show again after I see it in London next month.

Rooster ................ :-)

I love dance and find something to enjoy in most shows but I have rarely had such a good time as I had at The Lowry last night. Rambert delivered a scintillating programme of work by Mark Baldwin, Richard Alston, Merce Cunningham and Christopher Bruce. Each of those works is a choreographic masterpiece bur the show was called "Rooster" not "Mixed Bill" and it was that classic that I and most of the rest of the crowd had come to see.

I am just over three years younger than Bruce and grew up with the Rolling Stones.  I did not actually buy their records or indeed any pop music because I did not have a record player until my 21st birthday but then I did not need to because their music was everywhere at friends' parties and on the radio particularly programmes broadcast from ships moored in the Thames estuary.

The late 1960s was not a bad time to be young. Conscription had ended in 1963. There was full employment with relatively well paid work for young women. Those of us who were lucky enough to get into one of the handful of universities that existed at that time had full maintenance grants. The oral contraceptive pill had broken the link between intercourse and child birth liberating both sexes. The threat of nuclear annihilation was receding with the first test ban treaties and for a time the cold war seemed to be thawing. There were the first stirrings of movements for racial and gender equality.

There were still menaces, of course: the war in Vietnam, Apartheid, Rhodesia, the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring and Ulster. Life wasn't rosy everyone - not even in suburban Surrey where I grew up or St Andrews where I went to university - especially if you were poor, black or female - but it was a damn sight better than it had been in the forties, fifties and early sixties and the music and the fashions of the day reflected a time of optimism, growing freedom and relative prosperity.

Bruce's Rooster reflected that time uncannily. It is eight movements set to eight Stones' songs:

• Little Red Rooster
• Lady Jane
• Not Fade Away
• As Tears Go By
• Paint it Black
• Ruby Tuesday
• Play with Fire
• Sympathy with the Devil.

Not all those tunes are happy but then we weren't always happy all of the time. That's when we listened to tracks like Ruby Tuesday. Bruce has captured the moods and emotions in each of those songs uncannily with some breathtaking choreography an example of which you can see in this clip.

The piece would have been nothing without Marian Bruce's designs. The dancers' hair, those gorgeous black and red dresses, the boys' jackets and ties - authentic but not in the least dated - clothes especially Ruby's dress that every woman in the audience must have longed to wear. I remembered what we wore to parties during my schooldays at Belsize Park and Richmond or during my students days at Elie or on the North Haugh.

Now, as you can see, I am far too emotional to give this performance any proper critical analysis. If you want to learn more watch Bruce's commentary on the Unmasked page of Rambert's website, read these student notes from an Australian university, read a review or, better still, see the show for yourself as it tours the country. 

Justice requires a few words about the other pieces. The show opened with The Strange Charm of Mother Nature by the company's artistic director Mark Baldwin. For some reason or other I had expected it to be about animals or plants but it is actually about sub-atomic particles and was inspired by a visit to CERN. The music was provided by a live orchestra which reminds us of Rambert's classical roots and the fact that it was our first ballet company (see "Rambert at the Lowry - 9 Oct 2013" 11 Oct 2013). The music was eclectic - Bach, Stravinsky and Cheryl Frances-Head - and the designs by Katie Paterson stunning. Along the backdrop ran a beam of light at different heights and in different colours changing with the costumes of the dancers. A plasma stream perhaps? If so, it was effective.

The other treats of the evening were Richard Alston's Dutiful Ducks to Charles Amirkhanian's poem danced by Adam Blyde and my personal favourite. Merce Cunningham's  Sounddance.  I have to confess to being a Dane Hurst fan ever since I saw him dance Inala to Ladysmith Black Mazambo at the Yorkshire Ballet Summer School Gala at the Wells last year.  He was the first on stage and the last to leave conjuring his colleagues to do magnificent things in between. Don't get me started about Dane Hurst because it would not be fair to the other dancers who were brilliant too.

While watching Rooster a thought occurred to me. Rooster was created in 1991 which was well outside the period but there was at least one rock ballet in the 1960s, namely Peter Darrell's Mods and Rockers  for Western Theatre Ballet. Critics were a bit sniffy - see The Spectator of the 27 Nov 1963 - but crowds loved it and so, I think did the dancers. Western Theatre Ballet is now, of course. Scottish Ballet which is reviving Darrell's Nutcracker. Wouldn't it be lovely to see another Darrell classic again. Sarasota Ballet danced it in 1996 so it must be a lot easier to reconstruct than say Helpmann's Miracle in the Gorbals. So what about it, Mr. Hampson? Please. Pretty please.

Rambert at the Lowry - 9 Oct 2013

Dane Marie Rambert    Source: Wikipedia

Although it no longer includes "Ballet" in its title and it now describes itself as "our national company for contemporary dance" Rambert is in fact our oldest ballet company, Founded as the Ballet Club in 1926 it pre-dates the Vic-Wells Ballet, the precursor of the Royal Ballet and the Birmingham Royal Ballet, by about 5 years. Sir Frederick Ashton, Sir Anton Dolin and Dame Alicia Markova were all with Dame Marie Rambert, the founder of the company (see "A History of Rambert").

Dame Marie had danced with Diaghilev.  Rambert proudly displayed its heritage with Nijinsky's L'après-midi d'un faune which opened the quadruple bill at the Lowry in Salford last night.  Faun was one of the first ballets I ever saw and it remains one of my favourites as you can from my "Hommage au Faune" 9 July 2013. I think it was that work and in particular Bakst's set that won me to ballet many years agi  I saw Faun for the second time only last July when the Boston Ballet came to London (see "Boston Ballet: 'High as a flag on the Fourth of July!'" 7 July 2013). As I quipped in my twitter stream, ballets are a bit like buses. You wait an age for them then two come along at once. Rambert's production, unlike Boston's, did without Bakst's backdrop though the costumes were much the same.  Possibly The faun was danced intricately by Dane Hurst and the Nymph exquisitely by Angela Towler.  I had last seen Hurst at the Yorkshire Ballet Summer School gala at Sadler's Wells on 29 Sept 2013 where he had danced Insala to music by Ladysmith Black Mambazo (see "More Things I do for my Art - Autumn Gala of Dance and Song" 30 Sep 2013). Hurst impressed me then and he impressed me last night.

Chosen to accompany Faun was Mark Baldwin's "What Wild Ecstasy" with music commissioned from Gavin Higgins. As the curtain rise two giant wasps hanging from the ceiling prompted a murmur from an audience composed largely of schoolchildren.  The kids were a little distracting at times - particularly in the opening bars of Faun as cackles and titters - but it was still good to see them there.  The headgear of the dancers suggested flowers and insects and the ballet ended with a shower of yellow balls forming a circle on the ground which I took to represent pollen.

Next came Tim Rushton's Monolith, a very mysterious and haunting work set to the music of Pēteris Vasks. The programme states that "Monolith is inspired by pieces of monumental greatness and the people who formed them with their presence belief and mysteries." The set by Charlotte Østergaard and Rushton reminded me of images of Mars from Curisotiy with a range of hills and a volcano in the distance. Hues of reds, other worldly blues.  Watch this clip and form your own view.

The last work was The Castaways by the young American choreographer Barak Marshall and yesterday was its world première.   It is not every day that I get to a premiere much less review it.   This was more play than dance but still very enjoyable.  Twelve characters stuck in a cellar with no communication with the outside world except through a funnel through which were sent a bag of mail and a loaf of bread.  The music was eclectic ranging from English and Yiddish songs to the national anthem of the former Soviet Union.  All danced well but the following attracted my attention in particular: Kym Alexander, Kiril Biurlow and Vanessa Kang.

Rambert is about to move to splendid new premises on the South Bank and has invited the public to a series of events to celebrate their move in December.  I shall certainly take them up on their invitation.  I hope the move goes well for them.

Further Reading

9 Oct 2013   "The Castaways: Barak Marshall Creates For Rambert" The Ballet Bag