This second showcase of male dancing is about as bitty, scattershot and ultimately underwhelming as the first edition at the same venue in late January. Both programmes were assembled by the budding impresario Ivan Putrov and have featured fellow Ukrainian Sergei Polunin. The latter is the 22-year-old, tattoo-loving star who precipitously walked away from the Royal Ballet early this year for reasons that suggest a bid for greater personal and creative freedom.
Appropriately, given the media hoopla, Polunin kicks off the evening with his and Putrov’s version of Nijinsky’s seminal, century-old L’après-midi d’un faune in which said animal reacts orgasmically to a fleeting encounter with a maiden (Elena Glurdjidze, moonlighting from English National Ballet). Audience response was muted, as if they’d come expecting pyrotechnics but had to make do with an adequately served slice of history.
Putrov subsequently had a go at Vestris, fashioned for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1969 as an arch homage to the expressive range of the legendary 18th-century French dancer Auguste Vestris. A camp imp in foppish period costume and sparkling blond Marcel Wave wig, Putrov looked like a cross-dressing chorus girl out of Singin’ in the Rain. Again, the response to this mild amusement was polite.
The remainder of the bill includes Jorma Elo’s negligible scribble for the Royal Danish Ballet’s Tim Matiakis and, from the same company, Andrew Bowman in Tim Rushton’s also-ran Dying Swan. Both are fine stylists accorded scant opportunity to show their true capabilities here. The Cold War-era solo Narcisse allows Polunin to briefly display his spongy jumps and slippery, exotic presence. He and Valentino Zucchetti are jointly responsible for the naive tribute James Dean in which Polunin, in jeans and white T-shirt, balletically channels the iconic movie star. The result? Flashy, hollow angst.
Choreographic honours thus fall to Russell Maliphant whose torso-twisting Two X Two has Dana Fouras and Jesse Kovarsky swiping the air to rumbling beats. As a finale, Putrov, the American Clyde Archer and the Spaniard Isaac Montllor cavort nimbly round a free-standing wall in Nacho Duato’s 1997 Remanso. The latter, unlike most of the rest of this enervated bill, is a treat.
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