It’s a long time since I’ve seen Royal Ballet Flanders (RBF) perform live, and its final programme of the 2022/23 season was the first time I’d seen it dance at its home theatre in Antwerp. The company has changed a great deal in the past decade or so, moving further and further away from the classical/neo-classical repertory it used to perform to become more and more a platform for contemporary work. The company’s dancers are as good as they always were, but now they are more likely to be seen in choreography by Akram Khan or RBF’s former director, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The change hasn’t pleased everyone, but it seems it’s the way the company’s current director, Jan Vandenhouwe, wants to continue. RBF’s new programme, which opened at Opera Antwerp on 3 June before touring, showed pieces by William Forsythe, Crystal Pite and a new creation by associate artist Jermaine Maurice Spivey.
The three choreographers are linked: Pite danced with Forsythe’s company, and in turn Spivey danced for both Forsythe and Pite. However, although Forsythe and Pite are two very distinct dance makers, I felt Spivey has yet to prove his abilities. His piece for RBF, titled Extant, is seen from the viewpoint of himself as a queer Black man, and the choreographer describes his work as being about “existing and being and how to practice being. What do you have to do to become a version of yourself you want to be?” He commissioned Kenyan composer KMRU (Joseph Kamaru) to write the music for the work.
Spivey’s dancers act like a chorus of dissent, dressed in Marquet K Lee’s inventive costumes made mainly from denim off-cuts. They mockingly, holding up cardboard placards scrawled with slogans such as “Power”, “Communication”, “Responsibility”, “Representation” and “Ownership”, gather together like a gibbering rabble, make exaggerated shapes with their bodies or manically slap their own faces in unison. Individuals, such Zoe Hollingshead, talk through a microphone about thinking “a lot about collective energy” or about perpetuating “trauma”. Later, Justin Hopkins sings a baritonal version of the aria “O patria mia” from Verdi’s Aïda and also Rodgers and Hart’s song “My Funny Valentine” from Babes in Arms.
If this sounds a jumble, it certainly was, and for me the work only came into focus in the final moments when the dancers repeatedly attempted to make houses of cards with the banners that then continually collapsed to the ground – a symbol of how you need to build a society from firm foundations, not from flimsy slogans. Extant could have been a fascinating, heartfelt, first-hand study of the themes Spivey wanted to explore, and yet, at almost an hour in length, it was in desperate need of editing, a fact not helped on opening night by the 40-minute delay to the start of the performance due to technical problems with the stage lighting.
This was all underlined neatly by the much shorter works by Forsythe and Pite that followed. They demonstrated how brevity can sometimes make a much greater impact in the theatre. Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced sees the 20 dancers drag tables into the centre of the stage which they then perform around, under and on top of. To Thom Willems’ pumping electronic score, the piece becomes a comical, madcap, feverish game, the dancers' precise, quicksilver movements almost ricocheting amongst the tables as they jump, lift, tumble, crawl and slide. At the end, they drag the tables to the back of the stage again, the game over. It was exhilarating, but it was also funny.
Pite’s Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue, to music by Cliff Martinez from the film Solaris, was even briefer, but very different in mood. Five dancers – Clàudia Gil Cabús, Kirsten Wicklund, Claudio Cangialosi, Austin Meiteen and Shane Urton – were surrounded by floodlights. Constantly under surveillance, they could be people in prison or a detainment centre and the short, seamless series of duets sees them reacting, comforting, caring, cradling or helping each other, or trying to escape. Although the mood and the movements are often quiet, concise and considered, Pite’s work is also piercingly fraught and suffused with pain and sorrow. It’s a poignant, moving depiction of human suffering.
Jonathan's trip was funded by Opera Ballet Vlaanderen
