This was not quite Tamara Rojo’s final farewell as English National Ballet’s artistic director – the company still has tour dates for her Raymonda in Bristol and Southampton before she takes up the helm at San Francisco Ballet – but it was her goodbye to London, specifically at Sadler’s Wells where the company has presented regular seasons during her tenure. And she had something very special as a leaving gift in a rare new work by Mats Ek. Ever since Rojo performed his Carmen at The Royal Ballet in 2002, she has harboured the desire to work with him again and the Swedish choreographer has been on her wanted list since becoming the ENB artistic supremo in 2012. Ek retired from creating work in 2015 but thankfully the break was short-lived and – after a decade of trying – Rojo finally got her wish in the nick of time!
Ek had already created a version of Le Sacre du printemps in 1984, but his creative impulse towards Stravinsky’s score remained unsatisfied and accepting Rojo’s invitation to make a work on ENB was his ticket to having another go. It is only five years since ENB secured the rights to Pina Bausch’s Rite – and the company also has Kenneth MacMillan’s version in its repertoire – but the opportunity to gain a rare new work from the Swedish maestro was too good to pass up. In any event, Ek’s vision to Stravinsky’s music is as different to the Bausch and MacMillan creations as is chalk from two types of cheese. This is not a Rite based on tribal sacrifice but a polemic against the ritual of forced marriage, the tribe being replaced by a tight-laced family. Marie-Louise Ekman’s kimono-style costumes made of light foam covered in pale pink silk (think ironing board cover) were highly suggestive of a Japanese setting.
Ek’s choreography is counter-intuitive. Where Bausch and MacMillan flood the stage with pulsating bodies, Ek is content to have a couple of performers in understated movement. Where other versions often match the coruscating finale to Stravinsky’s score with the sacrificial death of the chosen one (Polish choreographer Izadora Weiss had her gang-raped in a gym changing room), Ek turns the tables with the Amazonian “forced” bride-to-be grabbing a stick standing erect at centre stage (the image of a phallus?) thus forcing her family and the surrounding community to collapse, mimicking but reversing the usual demise of the chosen one. Then, in an unusually calm epilogue, she walks slowly across the stage. It is both profound and surprising, something I never thought I would say about this much overused ballet score.
James Streeter and Erina Takahashi (married parents in real life) were the father and mother: the former strict and traditional; the latter bound by that same duty, but perhaps inwardly sympathetic to her daughter’s plight. Nonetheless she still erupts into a violent frenzy to force the daughter’s compliance. At one point the father seems to peck at the daughter with exaggerated forward neck movements (I didn’t like this). Emily Suzuki was outstanding as the daughter, torn between duty and rebellion, and the intimate scene in which she and her prospective bridegroom (Fernando Carratalá Coloma) explore each other physically while taking it in turns to lie on the ground had an emotional sensitivity straight out of an Ingmar Bergman film (Ek’s father, Anders, was a key member of Bergman’s regular ensemble). Surrounding the family is a threatening ensemble of sixteen dancers that represent the societal pressures for maintaining tradition, against which the daughter finally succeeds.
Ek’s world premiere concluded a bill that had opened with two non-narrative works exploring the pure joy of dance, beginning with a re-run of William Forsythe’s excellent Blake Works I, his response to seven pop songs by James Blake in The Colour in Anything album, first performed by ENB in their highly acclaimed The Forsythe Evening, earlier this year. Forsythe amply demonstrates how the classical language of ballet can integrate beautifully with pop music and the ENB dancers respond superbly.
Sitting between works by these septuagenarian titans of modern dance was Stina Quagebeur’s Take Five Blues. Quagebeur retired from dancing less than a month ago to concentrate on choreography and this work is an expansion of the eponymous dance film she made in 2020, later brought to the stage in the Reunion programme. Quagebeur has now added a couple more sections to make a more complete work to Nigel Kennedy’s Recital: Take Five album and her piece had a neat synergy with Blake Works I. I loved how the dancers – sassy Katja Khaniukova to the fore – interpreted the jazzy insouciance of the piece, all remaining on stage (as if in class) to watch others dance. It is to Quagebeur’s great credit that Take Five Blues proved an excellent bridge between ballets by two of the greatest choreographers of modern times.
