thu 28/03/2024

Black & White, English National Ballet, London Coliseum | reviews, news & interviews

Black & White, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

Black & White, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

A work created when choreographers really knew how to speak ballet

At the 11th hour (as we all know from the current telly series), English National Ballet has pulled a gorgeous plum out of its back catalogue that throws open vistas of what a ballet company should be: Serge Lifar’s sumptuous Suite en Blanc. Why this beauty, laced with the hot Spanish deliciousness of Eduard Lalo’s 1881 music, hasn’t been done for 35 years can presumably be put down to its sheer difficulty, because this is a ballet that bathes the eyes in lipsmackingly tricky, astronomically stylish choreography - stylish as only French classical ballet can be.

It’s dressed in white and black with a plain staircased platform behind, very simple - the women in white tutus, short and long, the men in white shirts and either black or white tights. The exactness of intonation and difference from one shape, pose or step to the next is thrilling, the smallest change of angle or tilt gripping your attention. Lifar was one of Diaghilev’s prodigies, and his sheer knowledge and command of classical ballet, his ability to change key with its visual tonic sol-fa, modulate, tilt, create new positions, even, shocks one with what’s been lost in ballet language in the following half-century.


Watching this piece after the three other modern works on the bill is like hearing someone start talking with fascinating wit, clarity, richness of vocabulary, nuance, sophistication and sheer curiosity after a fair bit of mumbling - some of it quite good mumbling, but mumbling nevertheless by people of much more limited articulation.

The music pours sunshiny melody and orchestral colour over the ears like Offenbach, delicate traceries of strings over deep harp arpeggios, or a rustling tambourine. Lalo wrote this for a lost Lucien Petipa ballet about a girl called Namouna (the music was recently taken on by Alexei Ratmansky for New York City Ballet).

Oh, the confidence with which three languid girls, like nymphs wafting in summer breezes, are followed by the crispest, wittiest of pas de trois for ballerina and two rival men, then female solos now pert and fun, now ravishingly sensual, or swift male ensembles of ferociously beaten feet, all interwoven with the cleverest little split promenade of girls tiptoeing from the left upstairs at the back, and from the right downstairs at the front. This is very clever and audience-delighting, of a sophistication from back in time when choreographers really did know how to speak ballet. Wonderful to watch, and certainly the orchestra's liveliest playing of the night under an otherwise sluggish Gavin Sutherland.

And its challenges clearly delight ENB’s dancers too, even if some of them looked last night as if just trying to remember the fiendish steps. In the remaining few performances, surely Elena Glurdjidze will cut cleaner shapes in the beauteous solo, “La Cigarette”, and Vadim Muntagirov and Yonah Acosta will apply their vast talents to wrap the technical business with sassier stylishness. But Crystal Costa and Laurretta Summerscales were already enjoying themselves in this swift footwork and daring tilts, and communicating their pleasure to the audience.

Resolution_cLaurentLiotardoENB’s director Wayne Eagling supplied two pieces of the five. The opening one, Resolution, uses Mahler’s five Ruckert songs of night and isolation with a dark and mournful expressiveness - a novel combination of five men and four women, used sometimes as evocative male-female couples, sometimes in blocks of men. The style is that swift, declamatory, whole-body swoop that you see a lot in Holland, where Eagling used to be artistic director of Dutch National Ballet, and though it lacks the detail of texture, or even a particularly attentive musicality, there’s a drive and emotional insistence about it that strikes home.

For Um Mitternacht (At Midnight) two couples dance a restless, shifting sur-text over the still, watchful music - the disquiet of the choreography amplifies the wariness in the song’s contemplation. In Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I have abandoned the world) Eagling has two men lift a third, again and again, awkwardly, attempting to fly him - one gathers this relates to his dedicating this piece to a muscular dystrophy charity. Elizabeth Sikora's intelligent contralto, clear and strong, cut through the Coliseum pit keeping it moving.

What's he mean by making the women do upside-down split lifts that constantly push their crotches into the men's faces?

A more mechanical format - at least at first - hampers Men Y Men, where having eight men to handle requires an often solidly geometrical response to Rachmaninov, surely the least geometrical of composers. Again the men are bare-chested, in black trousers, and once again the lighting is so dim you don’t see much detail, more an impression of athletic partnering and formation patterns. It suddenly springs into instinctive life with the Corelli theme and variations, where a never-ending walking procession (as it seems) of men across the stage is broken by individualised solos, the mercurial Yat Sen Chang, the boyish Juan Rodriguez catching the eye. And it ends in a brilliant upward burst of spins, hands flying overhead like helicopter rotors. This lean, athletic Dutch style quite suits ENB.

Paling beside these others is the saccharine yet peculiar Vue de l’autre, the new work by ENB dancer Van Le Ngoc, in which I have to point out something that dancer-choreographers evidently don’t notice any more but which truly jars the eye of a viewer. If Van wants us to believe in delicate, nuanced emotional messages of hands and eyes that say “yes”, “no”, “I’m not ready”, “well, maybe”, what’s he mean by making the skimpily leotarded women constantly do upside-down splayed lifts in their men’s arms that push their crotches right into the men’s faces? I mean, just how mixed a message can you give?

Otherwise, this is a piece of girly, one-note choreography, aptly accompanied by the angsty kind of piano strumming of three chords that Michael Nyman is good at (this is by Ludovico Einaudi). Fortunately there is the whoosh of vitality and wit that is Suite en Blanc to come at that point.

Watch Paris Opera Ballet's Aurélie Dupont dance "La Cigarette" from Suite en Blanc

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