Sara Veale | The Spectator columnists & writers

Rojo’s choreographic updating is a visual feast: English National Ballet’s Raymonda reviewed

Velvet waistcoats, technicolour tulle and some very spangly harem pants — English National Ballet’s atelier must have been mighty busy prepping for Raymonda, Tamara Rojo’s lavish new reboot of Marius Petipa’s 1898 ballet. Antony McDonald’s costumes shimmer as vibrantly as his stage design, and Rojo’s choreographic treatment is its own visual feast, packed with pinwheeling set pieces that repackage Petipa’s fearsome technique with their own pizazz. I can’t say the narrative is quite so electric, even with its conscientious redraft, which excises the xenophobia of the original scenario, along with its damsel-in-distress storyline, and trades the 13th century for the 19th, with the Crusades swapped for the Crimean War.

Zany and sensory-rich: Scottish Dance’s Amethyst/TuTuMucky at The Place reviewed

The Barcelona-born choreographer Joan Clevillé has form for off-beat storytelling with a streak of sincerity. Before becoming artistic director of Scottish Dance Theatre in 2019, he led his own dance theatre company, where even his wackier creations took their caprices seriously enough to get audiences on board. Clevillé’s new commission for SDT, Amethyst by Mele Broomes of Project X Dance, is sketched in similar shades. Zany and sensory-rich, this vortex of warbling voice work and zigzag dancing tallies up to something sleeker than its scrappy parts. The half-hour trio opens with Glenda Gheller on the mic, reciting a short speech about fragmentation — of stories, faces, perspectives, identities. ‘I feel like I am part of a fragmentation,’ she intones, repeating the line until it morphs from observation to mantra.

Richly layered and intricate: Royal Ballet’s The Dante Project reviewed

Where does the artist end and their work begin? Like 2015’s Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s new ballet swirls creator and creation to meditate on a journey of self-realisation. The subject this time is Dante, the Italian poet who redirected the course of western art and literature with The Divine Comedy. Over three acts, each based on a realm of the afterlife, an Everyman navigates sin, penance and salvation. There’s a lot to unpack — as ever, McGregor crafts a rich, layered choreographic language, and Thomas Adès’s accompanying score is just as intricate — but density is The Dante Project’s forte, elevating it to cosmic heights. The stellar Edward Watson — soon retiring after 20-plus years at the Royal Ballet — is our Dante, putting his spidery limbs to work in a pithy role that takes in furious thrusts and blunt, prickly extensions.

Skirt-swishing and stomach-dropping: Ukrainian Ballet Gala, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Like musical supergroups and Olympic basketball teams, ballet galas tend to prize individual gifts over group cohesion. A recent one produced by dramaturg Olga Danylyuk and Royal Ballet alumni Ivan Putrov gathers Ukrainian dancers stationed at companies around America and Europe, plus soloists from the Ukrainian National Ballet, for a showcase of homeland talent. There’s definite star power on show — the cast is rounded off with leads from the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet, and Putrov himself was set to perform before an injury sidelined him — but with it some contrasting and occasionally competing performance styles. These come to bear in System A/I, a new ensemble piece from Ludovic Ondiviela about androids powered by artificial intelligence.

Swaggerific display of pumping chests and crotch-grabbing struts: NYDC’s Speak Volumes reviewed

Last week I attended a dance performance in person for the first time since March last year. If you’d asked me to choose the ideal show for the occasion, I’d have probably picked something with marquee names and lavish costumes — a classical ballet gala, or maybe one of Matthew Bourne’s glittering productions. As it happens, I watched teenagers in bomber jackets snarl at each other in between dance-offs — and actually, it was just the ticket. Mental health issues among teens have rocketed during the pandemic, and this crew, from National Youth Dance Company, drive the point home with a hard-nosed production that doesn’t ask so much as command us to acknowledge their angst. It’s fiery, dynamic and deeply felt. I’m only a little embarrassed to admit that I leaked a few tears over their passion.

An awesome and hilarious display: Rambert’s Rooms reviewed

Social distancing continues to put the kibosh on large-scale productions, but Jo Stromgren has a nifty workaround in Rooms, which sees Rambert’s 17 dancers tackle 100 characters between them, giving the impression of a huge ensemble piece. The new show — part dance, part theatre — remakes the same few rooms over and over to present 36 ‘choreographic miniatures’, each with its own elaborate set-up. Zipping through this funhouse is a trip from the ordinary to the surreal and back again, with glimpses of dinner parties, crime scenes, radio segments, cannabis farms, raves, protests and more. It’s an imaginative feat of staging that’s all the more impressive for being performed and streamed in real time. Intimations of horror and violence — a dead body here, a suicide attempt there — rub shoulders with blasts of comedy, both daffy (witness a naked Simone Damberg Würtz sneaking out of her lover’s bed when his girlfriend shows up) and black (a delivery guy interrupting a funeral to swap out the urn for the right one).

Zippy and stylish, with a glint of mischief: William Forsythe’s The Barre Project reviewed

In the early Noughties there was a Hollywood subgenre (by which I mean a few cult movies, each with terrible sequels) about ballerinas who shake off their classical shackles and liberate the cool girl within. The crown jewel is Center Stage, in which an aspiring prima sticks it to her ballet masters after they affront her with some light criticism of her turnout. She’s not some faceless, uptight swan! She’s a free spirit who dances for fun, as signalled by the presence of not one but two Jamiroquai songs on the soundtrack. When Tiler Peck strutted on screen to James Blake’s ‘Buzzard & Kestrel’ in the opening minutes of The Barre Project, a new film she’s put together with the choreographer William Forsythe, I wondered if she might be trumpeting the same hokey message.

Tranquil, silky and serene: Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Lazuli Sky reviewed

When Carlos Acosta was named artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January of this year, he announced ambitious plans for his inaugural season, but the pandemic swiftly derailed these. Lazuli Sky, recently performed for live audiences in Birmingham and London, is his first commission to come to fruition, and while the programme has been scaled down from its original incarnation — with fewer dancers, musicians and audience members — it lives up to the panache of the company’s usual mixed bills and even manages to pull off a world première by Will Tuckett, a lodestar of contemporary British ballet. The titular work, Lazuli Sky, is Tuckett’s ode to nature’s glorious blues, namely the penetrating azure of the lapis lazuli stone, which Da Vinci used as a guiding hue for his skies.

Vigour and verve from a unique new Rite of Spring: Dancing at Dusk reviewed

Dancing at Dusk captures the final rehearsal of a new version of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. It’s only the third time a company other than Bausch’s own has been handed the reins to this piece, and it’s a treat to see its raw, convulsive rhythms reinterpreted by a new generation of performers. Filmed on a beach in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, it features a cast of 38 dancers from 14 African countries, assembled to bring a fresh lens to Bausch’s 1975 cult classic, itself a modern reckoning of a decades-old ballet. (Bausch’s original famously underscores the misogyny of the sacrificial virgin, doomed to dance herself to death.) This collaboration with the Senegalese L’école des Sables was meant to tour but this run-through unwittingly became the performance the world would see.

Sensual and silky: the Royal Ballet returns to Covent Garden

Wayne McGregor’s Morgen! and Frederick Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits are the first pieces of live dance — streamed in real time from an empty auditorium — to come out of Covent Garden since March. Unaware that recordings would be available afterwards, I clung to these fleeting displays with the panic of grandparents on a Zoom call, furiously, helplessly slapping the screen whenever it buffered. Both are quick ballet interludes to longer opera programmes — not afterthoughts, exactly, but not centrepieces either, though with two shirtless danseurs and a beloved ballerina between them, they do just fine asserting their presence. Vadim ‘the Dream’ Muntagirov tackles the Ashton work, reaffirming his repute with a soulful take on this five-minute lamentation, choreographed in 1978 to Gluck.

The genius of Martha Graham

If eight weeks in lockdown have brought out my baser impulses (biscuits by the sleeve, total renunciation of waistbands), it’s also deepened my appetite for culture at its plushest, liveliest heights. It’s not just beaches and brunches I’m craving as spring turns to summer and I round off my second month of working supine on the couch; it’s the sheen of studio lights on the Rothkos at Tate Modern, the whooshing sound when a dancer catapults herself across the Sadler’s Wells stage. Fortunately, watching the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake on Marquee TV last week — the world’s favourite ballet by the world’s foremost company — went some way in filling that void. Yuri Grigorovich’s 2001 production is performed to perfection here, with a consummate turn from prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova.

Watching dance online is an advantage, not a concession: BalletBoyz – Deluxe reviewed

Another day in isolation, another bid to find joy in my lone state-sanctioned walk. (Pro tip: stay out longer than is interesting or comfortable to brighten the prospect of another 20-plus hours indoors.) For dance critics, the C-19 crisis and its mass theatre shutdown has triggered some major thumb-twiddling. Like our exercise classes and therapy sessions, it’s time to go digital. Ballet DVDs and cinema broadcasts have been in the mix for a while, but it’s taken the abolition of live performances to spike serious interest in dance streaming. In the face of indefinite closure, Sadler’s Wells has shifted its programme to the web where possible, starting with a new bill from BalletBoyz, recorded just before the cancellation of the all-male troupe’s 20th-anniversary tour.

A bruising encounter: Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard reviewed

Pina Bausch’s best work always hovered between the familiar and the unknown. The late choreographer revelled in borders and thresholds, the hinterlands where fantasies collide with reality. The gulf between men and women — their conflicting desires, instincts, clout — was one of her favourite trenches to plumb, so it’s no wonder she was drawn to Bluebeard. Her 1977 production was shown for the first time in the UK this month. The show’s full title — Bluebeard. While Listening to a Tape Recording of Béla Bartók’s Opera ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’ — is the first hint at its tangled drift. Splintered into cryptic scenes, some buoyant, some disturbingly visceral, it doesn’t narrate Perrault’s folk tale about a serial wife-killer but contemplates its violence: Bluebeard’s catapult between cruelty and melancholy, his new bride’s doomed bid for deliverance.

Rambert’s latest uses the migrant crisis for superficial intrigue: Aisha and Abhaya reviewed

The January dance stage can be a site of naked contrition. Like a tippler grasping at green juice after a December of prosecco pukes (#NewYearNewMe), companies slap Swan Lakes and Giselles on the roster, eager to atone for the indulgences of Nutcracker season. It’s back to business at your opera houses and concert halls. Button up and batten down. Enter Sadler’s Wells Sampled, a hair-down do in a sea of chignons. The show is a taster of the assorted fare that passes through the London venue, from ballroom to breakdance. Tickets are cheap, there’s Proms-style standing, and no one will shoot you STFU daggers if you whoop too loud. It’s all very relaxed. Possibly too relaxed this year, at least in terms of programming.

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