An inspired concept by Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director, Carlos Acosta, working with legendary guitarist Tony Iommi, has led to this unique triptych of loosely aligned acts motivated by Black Sabbath’s music and created by three different choreographers (Raul Reinoso, Cassi Abranches and Pontus Lidberg under the latter's overall direction) using separate composer/orchestrators.
Above all else, it is an important new treasure in the cultural life of Birmingham, extending Acosta’s clever policy of fixing BRB firmly into its home city’s history and culture: one thinks of Miguel Altunaga’s City of a Thousand Trades and the promotion of Rosie Kay’s Romeo + Juliet as earlier examples of this domestic policy. All 16 shows in this run, including London and Plymouth, are already sold out and such commercial success is superbly timed given the dire financial predicament of the City Council. It’s good to know that some of their money has gone to create a Birmingham success story.
This performance featured a guest performance by Iommi, one of the Black Sabbath’s founders, its principal composer, and the only musician to stay with the band through all its various iterations. Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident, aged just 17, and was told by doctors that he would never play guitar again! The accident forced him to slacken strings and adopt a different finger technique, which in essence helped to establish Black Sabbath’s unique sound and what became known as “Heavy Metal” (although the band initially rejected that description). There is no obvious narrative arc to the ballet but Iommi’s poignant and uplifting example of triumph over adversity seemed to be a subliminal theme. A cautionary warning, however, is that Iommi’s appearance will not be a feature of subsequent shows and I suspect that the Sabbath fans’ adulatory ending on this evening will be diminished when the star isn’t there for future performances.
The outcome was not at all what I had expected for a ballet about a heavy metal band renowned for being on the dark side (the band’s name, after two unsuccessful forerunners, was inspired by an eponymous Boris Karloff horror film). The choreography was mostly light, often joyous and surprisingly lyrical. Orchestral arrangements were mixed with voiceovers by band members (plus Sharon Osborne, of course) and audience vox pop. Ozzy Osbourne’s recorded contributions invariably provoked laughter in the audience such as when he alleged that the band’s expenditure on cocaine was more than it’s recording costs before adding “and they were £80 grand”! A mop-haired, leather-jacketed guitarist, Marc Hayward, joined the dancers onstage in Acts 1 and 3 with his own brand of floor-hugging, bent-legged guitar playing. He looked slightly out of place to begin with, almost as if he had wandered into the wrong gig, but as the ballet progressed, Hayward seemed more at ease and in harmony with the dancers.
The production’s success is significantly underpinned by outstanding music, as it should be, although this is not a rehashing of Black Sabbath’s greatest hits but a significant new score in its own right, partly composed and supervised by Christopher Austin (who already had great successes under his belt with his orchestrations of music by White Stripes for Wayne McGregor’s Chroma and Joby Talbot’s music in Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). There is a deep, almost symphonic quality to Black Sabbath’s music (I think particularly of the track named after the band plus War Pigs and Paranoid) as well as a reflective, delicate instrumental side (Orchid). It must have been great material to work with and assisted by Marko Nyberg (Act 1) and Sun Keting (Act 2), Austin, who also conducted the performance, has coordinated and achieved another huge success with this music.
The choreography felt like Ballet 101 at times with dancers moving from pose to pose on every beat and a section that seemed like line dancing on steroids (it also included a remarkably long stage kiss with lips clamped together through countless movements) and some design effects seemed superfluous and unnecessarily fussy. But there is no doubting that the whole ensemble was in fine form in a work where the company is the star and where the choreography was at its best in the group sequences, either in harmony or where (towards the end of the final act) each dancer was let loose to perform their best tricks in a frenzied fiesta that prepped the Birmingham audience to erupt when local hero Iommi arrived to play!
An important side benefit of this remarkable juxtaposition of two of Birmingham’s greatest cultural institutions is a new audience demographic with many Sabbath fans experiencing ballet for the first time and, it seemed, enjoying it. Hopefully enough to come again although The Nutcracker might provide an interesting contrast! Perhaps Ozzy Osbourne can be persuaded to play the mouse king!
