Small repertory ballet companies maintain a precarious existence in these rapacious times. The recent resurrection of London City Ballet – three decades after a funding crisis shut down the company – is a gratifying anomaly. Now with the anchor support of an anonymous Japanese donor (practically unheard of in the US where deep-pocketed moguls plaster their names over everything they pay for) the company has completed a marathon tour of the UK, Portugal and China and has touched down in New York.
Christopher Marney has reinvented the company which inspired him as a boy to take up ballet. His new crew of dancers make distinctive impressions. All show off their classical chops in the opening Larina Waltz by Ashley Page: five couples sailing with panache through the ebullient waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, nailing those speedy changes of direction, precise landings and thorny traveling lifts. Ellie Young and Arthur Wille egged each other on while observing a courtly etiquette. Jimin Kim divulged a delicate, sparkling technique. Miranda Silveira had a mischievous glint in her eyes but didn’t oversell the material.
That concluded the classical tutu portion of the evening. Consolations and Liebestraum, an early Liam Scarlett, offered portraits of intimacy and intervening loneliness, that choreographically grew overwrought and self-conscious. The transcendent channeling of Liszt in the first three Consolations was Scarlett at his most inventive: artless gestures that flowed deftly into lifts of surprising beauty, often engineered by sliding an arm through the woman’s legs. Bárbara Verdasco and Arthur Wille in the tender, playful first duet looked like they were improvising on the spot – just like pianist Luc Xu Cheng seemed to be inventing the heavenly strings of notes that emerged from the piano crammed in the stalls. Isadora Bless and Joseph Taylor wrapped themselves around each other magnificently in the second duet, her beautifully articulated feet punctuating her attempts to tell him this thing between us can’t go on – yet somehow unable to tear herself from him. The concluding sections lapsed into familiar contemporary dance tropes of anguish while the pianist steadfastly delivered a gorgeously understated rendition of the familiar Liebestraum No. 3.
Balancing the revivals of lesser-known work was the newly commissioned Five Dances from young British Cuban choreographer Arielle Smith. John’s Book of Alleged Dances provide a capricious, playful sound palette – John being John Adams you know there must be a prepared piano thrown in the mix – and the smashing costumes (asymmetric tunics over bike shorts in neon colors) with backdrop lighting to match provide a wallop of a visual palette. The dancers often move like winds – whooshing, rippling, flickering, swirling – and at other times like marine creatures, undulating in a churning sea. The most taut and virtuosic of movements are tossed away with a winning insouciance, Arthur Wille in flaming red being the exception: he’s like a creature possessed, with a need for speed.
For the most part, encounters are brief and territorial, as they would be in the animal kingdom or when aliens from another planet send a spaceship to investigate ours. Here and there a flicker of human instinct, but even when Isadora Bless and Joseph Taylor in seafoam green found some alone time, they vibrated on a higher plane. The piece is a joyous lark.
Marney’s exhilaratingly non-trad retelling of the biblical encounter between Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden wrapped the program. Jennie Muskett’s eerie, cinematic score evoked a bleak, ravaged world before Eve bit the forbidden apple, after which it conjured a serene and hopeful place, that should send the religious right into a tailspin. A haunting performance by Cira Robinson, the only dancer on pointe in this piece, as the first human ever to be caught up in a bad romance – with Álvaro Madrigal, magnificent in a blood red unitard, quadriceps bulging through rips in the fabric, who comes crawling out from under a partially lifted scrim.
Robinson/Eve senses that she possesses a mysterious power when she reaches toward a flying bird (projected on a scrim) and zaps it into feathers which fall to the ground then reconstitute themselves into a whole flock of birds. Post-Applegate, she gathers the ensemble – who are clad only in flesh-toned leotards, the women sporting innocent ponytails – and appears to organize them into a productive society. She then prepares to exit this world, standing on the shoulders of another dancer, headed upstage toward the sunlit scrim. Aside from a nod to George Balanchine’s Serenade, one might read into this work a commentary on the susceptibility of ordinary people to tyrants. Or a message of hope for a ravaged planet.
Britain and the world are much changed since London City Ballet’s glory days, and touring presents unprecedented headaches. May a multitude of anonymous angels keep this new venture afloat.
