There is potentially something for everyone in this final programme of The Royal Ballet season: two contrasting examples of pure dance from the company’s most influential choreographers of the past 20 years; one, an exercise in free-flowing dance within a particular design aesthetic; the other more thematic and structured. All topped off by a narrative ballet by one of the two great Royal Ballet choreographers of the twentieth century.
The programme opened with the world premiere of Wayne McGregor’s Untitled, 2023. The non-title being a tribute to the late Cuban-born artist, Carmen Herrera, with whom McGregor initially collaborated on this work, since it was usual for her to simply label her abstract, minimalist paintings as “untitled” with the date of composition. Such nomenclature being unfamiliar in dance, future reviewers will thank McGregor for saving them the bother of looking up the date on which Untitled, 2023 was premiered!
This ought to be the case since his latest work should be around for the long run. The choreography is sleek and fluent with shades of Merce Cunningham in the liberal and organic way dancers moved independently of one another, seducing the watcher into the feeling of improvisation before sequences of tight synchronicity brought home the reality of his sharp choreographic structure.
Herrera died in 2022, at the grand age of 106 and an indelible part of her legacy is stamped into this work through the elongated, green isosceles triangle that dominated the stage, a representation of her 1959 painting Blanco y Verde, together with a white structure like a fallen-down letter ‘L’. With a pale blue/grey surround colour, the former seemed like an uninhabited island seen from a distance at sea, and the latter was faintly reminiscent of an iceberg. Herrera’s aesthetic followed through in the many variations of green and white unitards worn by the 19 dancers, designed by Burberry’s Chief Creative Officer, Daniel Lee.
The full ensemble was not on stage together until the curtain call and some seemed just to be passing through. Joseph Sissens and Leo Dixon dominated the opening section, and the austere elegance of Melissa Hamilton and Fumi Kaneko was also memorable. The closing solo by Calvin Richardson was sublime and put the finishing gloss on a work unquestionably in the top drawer of McGregor’s many pieces for The Royal Ballet. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s abstract score (I found imagery of rocket launches and spin dryers) seemed to fit the Herrera aesthetic very well, although not really my ‘cup of tea’.
Christopher Wheeldon’s Corybantic Games received a welcome revival having been commissioned (alongside McGregor’s Yugen) to celebrate Leonard Bernstein at 100. Unfortunately, the third choreographer on that 2018 programme, the late Liam Scarlett, seems now all but forgotten on this stage (Swan Lake excepted) .
Wheeldon’s ballet was created on Bernstein’s Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) with Erdem Moralioglu’s distinctive costumes of diaphanous skirts and flowing ribbons further enhancing the Greek aesthetic. Jean-Marc Puissant’s versatile set enabled a subtly varied ambience for each of five arresting movements.
Anna Rose O’Sullivan (already scintillating in McGregor’s earlier work) and Luca Acri showed a penetrating and forceful attack through the third section, followed by the gorgeous adagio, in which each duet was danced in different styles but always with a deep emotional attachment to the music. The musical theatre influences of both Wheeldon and Bernstein (he composed Serenade not long before West Side Story in the mid-50s) were evident in the final movement with the whole ensemble delivering something akin to a jazzy Broadway “dream ballet” against the backdrop of Puissant’s corn-coloured sunrise.
The programme closed with a revival of the third act of Kenneth MacMillan’s Anastasia, originally created as a one-act ballet in 1967, focusing on the (false) claims of Anna Anderson to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia and taking the audience inside her troubled mind; fuelled by film of the Romanovs at play; some gut-wrenching footage of summary firing squads; and by the intrusive investigations of medics and émigré aristocracy. I much prefer the full-length ballet in which Anastasia is given context through two pre-revolutionary acts. This single act has not aged well.
It did however provide a suitably dramatic vehicle for Laura Morera’s last performances after a splendid career of 28 years. She gave full vent to the nightmarish expressionism of the role, and it is especially pleasing that Morera shares these final performances with Bennet Gartside as the husband since they joined the company in the same year and have shared the stage so many times over three decades. Personally, I would have liked Morera to have given an Ashton performance as her finale, since it is a language that she excels in; or a Scarlett ballet, given that she was influential in interpreting his work (she acknowledged her debt to him when receiving her Best Female Dancer Award at the National Dance Awards, earlier in the week).
