So Are We – Lightfoot and Leon – RB

The Royal Ballet’s standing as a serious classical dance company takes another hard knock with its latest programme, a double bill by the resolutely contemporary choreographic duo of Sol León and Paul Lightfoot which contributes to the pull away from pure ballet effected by the ensemble’s current management. Lightfoot and León were formed artistically both as dancers and dance-makers in Jiří Kylián’s Nederlands Dans Theater (not, it must be emphasised, the classically-based Dutch National Ballet) and they have continued in the Czech choreographer’s style and approach, one which, in truth has never gained much, if any, traction in the UK. Lightfoot is British born and trained at the Royal Ballet School in the 1970s before joining NDT2 in 1985 and rising to be NDT1’s director between 2011 and 2020. León is Spanish and joined NDT2 from the National Ballet Academy of Madrid in 1987, also remaining with the organisation until 2020. 

With classically-based choreography in serious, if not terminal, decline in the UK, it was a strange and arguably perverse decision to hasten the process by inviting the pair to stage two of their works at Covent Garden in a programme elliptically titled So Are We – they chose Shoot the Moon, a 2006 piece which has gained some favour around the world, and Salle de danse, an extended reworking for the stage of a lockdown piece. Ticket sales have been poor, as their names are almost unknown to a London ballet audience, but at least the company’s dancers seem to be having a good time, superb, mostly very young artists eager to get their dancing teeth into something in which they can make a mark at the end of what has been a particularly unexciting season for both them and their audience. But dancers having fun does not a worthwhile artistic experience make, and serious questions remain as to whether a full evening featuring the limited talents of Lightfoot and León is currently the right choice for The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden.

One thing going for Shoot the Moon, an admittedly visually chic essay in euro-angst, is the choice of score – the second movement of Philip Glass’s hard-to-resist Tirol Piano Concerto – which drives things on, even through the greatest excesses of Kylián-esque hand puppetry, silent screams, funny walks, leg flicks and twitches. Five dancers, all in some form of personal relationship crisis, none of them in the least bit happy, play out their myriad emotions as walls spin to reveal one domestic room after another. It is all a little too overwrought and whatever the emotions are which possess the dancers, they are unknown and unknowable to the audience members who spectate voyeuristically at people not having a particularly good time of it. The dancers themselves are fine, if, with the exception of Francesca Hayward who literally plays to the camera as we see her face blown up and broadcast above the set, characterised by a certain blandness even as they mouth silent words and gurn towards us. As part of an interesting mixed triple bill, it might just pass muster, but as an opener to a whopping chunk of more Lightfoot-León, it does not bode too well. 

Fears were confirmed with 60 minutes of laboured whimsy which, despite the choreographers’ avowed intention to evoke ballet class, has not much to do with that particular branch of dance. Is the joke on the company and its audience when, given the opportunity to create a piece for one of the world’s premier ballet ensembles supposed to evoke their world, that the women are not even put en pointe? If it is, then it is not funny. What is not amusing either is to see how little the choreographic duo have developed in their style over the 20 years between Shoot the Moon and Salle de danse. Yes, the scale is now much larger and the hints at narrative have been dropped, but the tropes of the former return in the latter, nowhere more so in the movements for a preposterously dressed William Bracewell who is also called upon to shout, laugh and generally debase himself with nonsense. Seriously underused for 19 20ths of the work is Fumi Kaneko, reduced to Cruella De Vil make-up and hair and slow prowlings round the stage. 

Goodness, how the young dancers of the company throw themselves into the unending leaps, bounds, stretches, flicks, kicks and bum-wigglings dreamt up for them; tireless energy from eager artists, but to no real purpose. There are 20 sections plus three more for Bracewell and Kaneko, a long time indeed, a length of time only the greatest dance geniuses can hope to fill with meaningful movement. Lightfoot and León do not fall into that exclusive category, and the work emerges as overly-long – probably by about 30 minutes. The sections are all given French names evoking elements of ballet class, but are rarely linked to the movements we actually see; there are rare exceptions, most notably XI. Pirouettes spectacularly danced by Alejandro Muñoz and Harrison Lee who spin themselves silly in a dazzling variety of turns.

To add insult to balletic injury, for this staging Russian-born composer Ilya Demutsky was engaged to create a new score, thus having to compose to already-existing choreography. The music originally used and which forms the basis of his composition is Knudåge Riisager’s orchestrations of Carl Czerny’s famous piano Etudes which were created for Harald Lander’s one-act 1948 ballet Études, a celebration of, you guessed it, ballet class featuring mounting challenges starting from the basic five positions and ending with the most spectacular virtuoso dancing imaginable. Unfortunately, there is enough of the original in Demutsky’s music (even in the orchestration) to make one wish one was watching the Lander and not Lightfoot-León while Demutsky’s contribution feels as if Riisager/Czerny has been put through AI on a Shostakovich setting. 

In all then, despite the best efforts of the dancers, à éviter.