Work: Metamorphosis

Choreographer Arthur Pita’s production of The Metamorphosis – I hesitate to call it a ballet, for it is much more than that – is an eerie, thrilling and wonderfully collaborative piece of dance, led most assuredly and most grotesquely by Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson, here touring to the Joyce Theater, New York.

There isn’t much to say about Arthur Pita’s The Metamorphosis that hasn’t already been said. Returning the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre, this award-winning production is a dance-theatre imagining of Franz Kafka’s novella of the same name. I missed this production the first time, so was very interested in seeing it the second time around, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Edward Watson does angst expertly. The Royal Ballet principal proved himself as a convincing drug-ridden, suicidal Crown Prince Rupert in MacMillan’s ballet Mayerling and he was a nervy, jittery bespectacled White Rabbit in Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now he’s a bug and literally climbing the walls.