fri 29/03/2024

Ballet Boyz, The Talent, Aylesbury | reviews, news & interviews

Ballet Boyz, The Talent, Aylesbury

Ballet Boyz, The Talent, Aylesbury

Nine new Ballet Boyz win their spurs in a venture of rare courage

Aylesbury, a town without a theatre, has built itself one - a gleaming, glass-fronted, smack-you-in-the-eye 1,500-seater, driven and supported by the district council. High Wycombe and Milton Keynes must beware, so thin are the pickings these days for the regional theatres. The pity is that the Ballet Boyz’ show The Talent last night was the only night of decent dance programmed in this amazing new venue for half of 2011.

This is the desert that the dumbing of box office has led to - swanky new theatres pop up with little but Chinese circus and Russian “fat” ballet to show, while proper contemporary dance creators struggle to get half a dozen dates. The Ballet Boyz, William Trevitt and Michael Nunn (now Ballet Grandadz practically at 40), have a new generation of Ballet Ladz to show, and this UK tour concludes at Sadler’s Wells from 29 March, the day they find out whether the Arts Council has axed their grant and killed them off.

Last night’s triple bill wasn’t perfect but it has a terrific highlight in Russell Maliphant’s Torsion, a duet now remade cunningly and compellingly for six performers, and a promising piece made for the whole nine Boyz by a young Czech choreographer, Jarek Cemerek. There are also the cheery videos now expected of a Ballet Boyz production, notable this time for a scene showing all the new Ballet Boyz bare-bottomed in a river, wearing only dancers' belts (thus answering a million unspoken questions among audience members).

Ballet_boyz_in_studioThe nine lads are almost all at the green end of dance, some of them having begun dancing as late as 17 or 18, and only three or four years later have been crash-coursed to a level of accomplishment assaying the imperturbably smooth, coiled grace of Maliphant’s work, created for the F1 partnership of Nunn and Trevitt in their peak years. One of the new boys first started dancing in secondary school after a visit from the Ballet Boyz, which is a typical piece of evidence about the fecund impact that these two former Royal Ballet leading men have on the UK dance scene.

All-male groups in dance are the exception. Lea Anderson’s Featherstonehaughs have long since lost the will to live, or was it I who did so when I watched their recent show? But there can be a real frisson of difference when males take to the stage as a group, not just as a pair. Six of them staring at each other in Torsion make dramatic inflections with the flicker of an eye; danger, reassurance, obedience. Men in a group, in a closed society, are invariably intriguing.

When Nunn and Trevitt danced together, it was quite unlike other men together; not wary or flirtatious, but exploring trust, able to generate some extraordinary physical feats of lift and catch, knuckle in socket, hand in glove, spanner on bolt, that nevertheless spoke an intense language about a deeply bonded friendship - could make you envy it, even. In Torsion Maliphant homed in on the specific complementariness of the pair, as well as glancing at the more classic ritual stand-off of masculinity when two men link arms: erotic, athletically challenging, lethal.

Now for The Talent Maliphant doubles or trebles those velvety, precisely calibrated couplings with the other male pairs, and offsets them in almost academic counterpoint, and set against the whispering and electronic actuality of Richard English's hypnotic score the new version seems like multiple mirroring with tiny flaws, refracting differences, questions, bonds, an overall mystery that is powerfully alluring to us women. Since all the performers face the same physical choreographic challenges, one’s eye very swiftly fastens on the remarkable sinuousness and appetite for detail of the little black-haired guy - Miguel Esteves, so I am told. I wonder if he's studied Sylvie Guillem, Maliphant and the Ballet Boyz' past companion-in-arms.

Ballet_boyz_Alpha_1The other two pieces hitch pillion on the Maliphantine genre of solemnly reassuring pairwork: Paul Roberts’s Alpha (pictured left) is a mimsy, brown-costumed imitation of the pattern (not in the least helped by the namby-pamby music of wannabe-Dylan Keaton Henson).

But Jarek Cemerek’s Void, though its videos steer too close to clichés about young men, rap and street crime, touches on a new dramatic potential I haven’t seen worked by anyone recently, that of the conflict in young male urges between conforming and being different. His choreography has a rough and strenuous earthiness, tough on the knees and well-practised, but it also has moments that catch attention, hover suspensefully on the brink of improvisation - where the performers have to be actors in a trice, snap up a fleck of narrative, fearfulness, a sense of lostness, with echoes of DV8 in its early great days, or Hofesh Shechter’s nowadays. Inconsistent as yet, but there’s an assertive spark there that I'd like to see some more of.

Overall, this is an unusual, feisty and risky evening in these drab and cowering days. Nunn and Trevitt have a very rare impresarial skill, something as priceless as fine choreographic talent, and their ability to attract choreographers, dancers and audiences in their mission to tap untouched corners of potential for male contemporary British dancing is startling and hugely worthwhile. Cemerek was the winner of a choreographic competition set up by the two, to whom 185 dancemakers applied. Directors with the determination to risk capturing and training raw talent into a fighting force like this, and having the chutzpah to fill a healthy proportion of the capacious Waterside, for example, are too rare to let slip. If the Arts Council stuff them next month, the scene outside London will be very dark.

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters