New English Ballet Theatre (NEBT) is a venture to be supported and admired. Now in its fourteenth year, this chamber company is no longer new, having become well established under the continued direction of founder Karen Pilkington-Miksa, with an impressive array of benevolent support from so many trusts, foundations and philanthropic individuals that it takes two pages of the programme to list them.
The company’s growing reputation has encouraged some of the most talented emerging choreographers to create work on NEBT and – hot on the heels of Birmingham Royal Ballet’s association with Black Sabbath – it has also led to a collaboration with Genesis, thus bringing the soundtrack to many of the audience’s youth to life in movement. The Genesis Dance Project featured six of the band’s songs in their original form underpinning work by four different choreographers in a curate’s egg of dance that occupied the second act.
Daniela Cardim’s Baroque Encounters did exactly what it said on the tin, being the most distinctive and memorable piece on the programme. Cardim (now the NEBT assistant director) chose beautiful harpsichord music by Bach and her choreography for seven dancers was rich in imagery and musicality and elegantly layered with exquisite transitions. April Dalton’s long red skirts for both men and women enhanced the movement's slick flow.
Peter Leung’s All in Passing was another work for seven dancers but it lacked the holistic structure of the preceding baroque ballet. In one of two “talking heads” films that described and explained all the work on the programme, Leung explained that his choreography involves a great deal of improvisation in association with the dancers. The outcome was episodic, as if it were several different pieces of choreographic material loosely stitched together, and it lacked a cohesive structure.
This varied quality continued into the Genesis Dance Project, a suite of six capsules of dance that also bore no relation to one another except for the connection through the music of Genesis in a selection of four singles and two tracks from the early Selling England by the Pound album, ranging across 20 years (from 1973 to 1991).
The best of this bunch came in the witty work of Kristen McNally who choreographed a slinky Pan’s People number to the memorable Phil Collins’ vocals of I Can’t Dance, albeit using nine dancers of both genders in contrast to the six women of Babs and co. Her tight formation of rocking, sinuous movement fitted the song like a close-fitting glove. If this was good, then the best was still to come in her outstanding Invisible Touch duet, taking the song title literally by having Genevieve Heron and Nicholas Vavrečka traverse the stage in various angular lines of close formation but without ever touching as if kept apart by an invisible magnetic force. It was a fascinating example of pop choreography, superbly performed.
Ruth Brill took a narrative approach to a love story in which a Romeo and a Juliet (but not the R&J) were under the control of Tiresias under the watchful eyes of a small corps of six dancers. Dan Corthorn was suitably authoritarian as Tiresias (although I wasn’t too sure about his fur-collared coat) and there was a palpable chemistry between Ana Freire and Noah Benzie-Drayton as the lovers.
Valentino Zucchetti’s neoclassical language to the album track Firth of Fifth was intended to represent the afterparty atmosphere once a nightclub closes although I would not have guessed this without reading the programme note. Clean lines and elegant phrasing are always apparent in Zucchetti’s choreography but I’m not sure that there was a suitable synergy between the movement and the music, and I would always prefer to see his choreography representing the richness of classical music.
I was disappointed by the two pieces from Wayne Eagling, opening with Watcher of the Skies for the full ensemble of ten dancers, and then an abstract interpretation of Helen of Troy’s relationship with her husband (Menelaus) and abductor (Paris) leading to the launch of a thousand ships (a lyric in the song). In these works, as with those of the first act, I found some dancers appearing to be anxiously focused upon conquering the mechanics of the movement and remaining in the right space or in unison with other dancers rather than polishing their technique by expressing the intended artistry.
While congratulating Pilkington-Miksa on bringing so much new work to the stage at once, it was a very mixed set of offerings, as indeed was the level of performance. Risk-taking and innovation in ballet – as in everything else – is to be applauded but with the necessary acceptance that it may not always produce the desired results.
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