A collective sense of pleasure in motion from proficient dancers from English and Norwegian corporations – Seen and Heard Worldwide

United Kingdom Subsequent Era Pageant – New English Ballet Theatre/Norwegian Nationwide Ballet 2: Linbury Theatre, Covent Backyard, London, 15.6.2024. (JO’D)

Acts of Exaltation
Choreography – Matthew Ball
Music – Claudio Monteverdi

Dancers – Genevieve Heron, Jerome Barnes, Ana Carolina Freire, Tamara Hinson, Ella Mansford, Dan Corthorn, Jethro Paine

Baroque Encounters
Choreography – Daniela Cardim
Music – Johann Sebastian Bach

Dancers – Ana Carolina Freire, Genevieve Heron, Emily Pohl, Tamara Hinson, Jose Alves, Noah Benzie-Drayton, Dan Corthorn

The place it Started
Choreography – Anaïs Touret
Music – Joey McNamara

Dancers – Isabella Boyd, Alicia Rose Couvrette, Hannah Thi Dvergsdal, Dmytro Litvinov, Giuseppe Ventura

Limerence
Choreography – Kumiko Hayakawa
Music – Johannes Brahms

Dancers – Isabella Boyd, Alicia Rose Couvrette, Julie Ann Joyner, Taeryeong Kim, Lulu Welford, Pedro Alcantara, Gabriel Gudim, Linus Lynch, Isaac Martin, Giuseppe Ventura

Step Flippantly
Choreography – Sol León and Paul Lightfoot

Dancers – Isabella Boyd, Taeryeong Kim, Anna Sheleg, Charlotte Steckmest, Dmytro Litvinov, Giuseppe Ventura

The Royal Ballet principal, Matthew Ball, has carried out choreography of his personal with New English Ballet Theatre prior to now. For the Subsequent Era Pageant on the Royal Opera Home, he creates work on the corporate’s younger and keen dancers. Acts of Exaltation, on a theme of broadly outlined ‘religiosity’, is ready to music by Claudio Monteverdi (all of the night’s music comes from recordings). It devises complicated patterns of our bodies, arms and palms. Generally the patterns are too complicated, too static. The piece appears weighed down by its idea. Elsewhere it opens out into sections that give the dancers gentle and freedom, permitting them to specific a collective sense of pleasure in motion.

Daniela Cardim’s Baroque Encounters, to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, is in some ways a extra standard work. But it rigorously reveals every dancer to their finest because it strikes from a gap ensemble by way of combos of two, three, or six. The corporate has danced it earlier than; however one of many dancers within the duet, this time, is Jose Alves, a core member of Ballet Black for a number of years. He’s well-matched by his companion, Emily Pohl.

After the interval it’s the flip of Norwegian Nationwide Ballet 2, the ‘recruiting floor’ for Norwegian Nationwide Ballet itself. This firm’s first piece, The place it Started, reveals 5 dancers huddled in a bunch sporting clothes of greyish linen that counsel a hospital or an asylum. Behind them is a semi-circle of spotlights (like that always discovered within the work of Crystal Pite). After they transfer, to a throbbing or pulsating rating, the dancers hold near the ground. Apart from a central duet during which a person (Dmytro Litvinov) lifts one of many girls (Hannah Thi Dvergsdal) in direction of a lightweight that descends on a wire.

Limerence, in contrast, is all lightness and move. To music for strings by Brahms, in unfastened or floaty costumes of muted gray (for the boys) and brown (for the ladies), ten dancers undergo a crisp, neo-classical dance that always brings Balanchine and Robbins to thoughts. The unity in what the dancers do, with their arms above all, testifies to the coaching they’ve obtained.

Step Flippantly presents its dancers on a white stage in opposition to a backdrop of winter timber by moonlight. However the girls put on floor-length robes of soppy, emerald-green velvet; the boys are in tan and gray. To a soundtrack of ladies’s voices (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares) the dancers, who’ve rolled on to the stage, make agitated, angular actions that carry their elbows and knees to the fore. The setting and the choreography are stark; however as carried out by these younger dancers the piece takes on an unexpectedly emotional high quality. It turns into mesmerising.

Interviewed in a brief movie about Norwegian Nationwide Ballet 2, dancer Taeryeong Kim says her dream is to affix Norwegian Nationwide Ballet and to bop on the primary stage of the Oslo Opera Home. On the idea of Step Flippantly, it’s a dream (in the event that they share it) which may come true for a number of members of the corporate.

John O’Dwyer