From our critic in residence, Alastair Macaulay:
One of the most fascinating revelations of the National Ballet of Japan’s debut season at the Covent Garden opera house (July 24-27) was that the Japanese – who performed “Giselle” – dance largely in the ways of the British Royal Ballet. This isn’t a huge surprise: the company is now directed by Miyako Yoshida, who was a Royal Ballet principal for many years. Still, the National Ballet of Japan, founded in 1997, could have chosen to develop along a more Russian stylistic route. But no: the Japanese dancers show accentuations of line, wrists, fingers, épaulement, and head positions that are all British (in particular, wrists are unobtrusive, while arabesque lines are geometrically straightforward and lucid). Footwork, once a hallmark of Royal Ballet style, is actually quicker with these Japanese than with today’s Covent Garden dancers. Mime gestures and physical characterisations are vivid. And tempi are far quicker and more alert than the sonorously saggy slowness with which the Covent Garden conductors now oblige the resident dancers.
In a few matters of “Giselle” text – the circuit of turns with which the heroine ends her Act One solo variation, the upright posture with which the wili corps de ballet hops across the stage – these Japanese use inferior Soviet simplifications of the old text, but that’s because the Royal Ballet does too. Dick Bird’s decors are strikingly picturesque, though implausible in its trees. (The silver birches with which he surrounds his village in Act One have the autumn foliage of other trees. The trees of Act Two, perched on the rim of a large dip in the ground, all have feeble foot systems.)
Here’s hoping we see the National Ballet of Japan again in London. Maybe this first impression is misleading, but it gives me the feeling that, were I resident in Tokyo, I might become a balletomane again – as I scarcely am any more with Covent Garden’s resident ballet company.
The Royal Ballet School has long given an annual performance in the main opera house at Covent Garden. These days, it’s preceded by a pair of Next Generation performances downstairs at the Linbury Theatre and by a whole week at the Holland Park Theatre. These reflect more than one agenda. The School likes to encourage the idea that it and its parent company are the world’s finest home of new choreography. (My main reaction is that the choreography emanating from the School tends to look breathlessly busy.) It also studies certain items of company repertory with particular care, so that its dancers learn stylistic lessons that will stay with them for life, and so that connoisseurs of those items can refer back to these performances as yardsticks. Some of the repertory danced by the school may be jazz, some may be folk, but enough of it should demonstrate the quality of the school’s classical style.
Especially but not exclusively in an “Aurora’s Wedding” one-act plotless compilation of “Sleeping Beauty” dances and in Frederick Ashton’s Victorian-skaters idyll “Les Patineurs” (1937), the School’s 2025 quality was high, lively, and fresh, abounding in dynamic contrasts and in theatrical flair. Those performances brought to a joyous conclusion the first year of the School’s new director, Ian Mackay. “This is one of the world’s great schools!” an experienced American friend kept exclaiming at the first Holland Park performance: he was right.
If Mackay can build on this excellent start, he will rejuvenate Royal Ballet Schooling. If only someone now could rejuvenate its parent Royal Ballet! Much about this school “Aurora’s Wedding” was exciting as the company’s “Sleeping Beauty” is not. I don’t envy these kids graduating into a repertory composed of new ballets by Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon, let alone the late Liam Scarlett’s misguided “Swan Lake”.
There’s been no dancing onstage at this year’s Albert Hall Proms, but many of the concerts have been addressing those most elusive questions: what music can be danced to? and how? Maybe Harrison Birtwhistle’s “Earth Dances” (1986, returning to the proms on Monday 28 July conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth with the BBC Scottish Symphohy Orchestra) depicts the imaginary dances of tectonic plates, but, even thirty-nine years after this score’s premiere, there remains a vast gap between this music and any kind of human dancing we have known.
Yet who can tell? In 1896, when Chausson wrote his “Poème” for violin and orchestra, that cannot have sounded dance-friendly music in either structure or rhythm. There’s no toe-tapping quality there. In 1936, however, the choreographer Antony Tudor – often brilliantly offbeat in his musical instincts – used it for his ballet “Jardin aux lilas” (“Lilac Garden” as it became known), connecting music and dance in one of the most psychologically haunting works of all dance theatre. On Wednesday July 23, when Randall Goosby played it with the Orchestre National de France (Cristian Mǎcelaru conducting), I, remembering the ballet, marvelled again at the imagination that Tudor showed in making Chausson’s music sound both psychological and atmospheric.
The same concert, by contrast, presented the U.K. premiere of “Danse mystique” (1922) by Charlotte Sohy (1887-1955). We could always hear why this score, as conducted by Mǎcelaru, had been named “mystique”. Why Sohy called her score “danse” was never remotely clear.
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