Robbins was famously a stickler for casting — various attempts to restage his ballets at the Opera House fell by the wayside. Well, he didn’t live to see Carlos Acosta in this piece. Robbins took Debussy’s score and references to Nijinsky’s original ballet for his 1953 re-imagining, in which the faun and the nymph become two dancers in a modern ballet rehearsal room. Jean Rosenthal’s simple set is a silky white box of three sides. We, the audience, are the “mirror” to which the movements are directed.
The boy is asleep on the floor, then he wakes, flexes and stretches, self-absorbed, self-loving. Acosta, with his magnificent physique, could hardly be bettered for the sensuous, young-animal quality of his mesmerising performance. The girl, Sarah Lamb, arrives for her own workout and is swept up into a hypnotic pas de deux. The boy turns briefly from the mirror to press a kiss on her cheek; she touches its imprint, looking at us, then tiptoes away, her life possibly changed, leaving her faun to resume his languorous dreams. It is magical, intimate and magnetic. At the second performance, Ivan Putrov was supple and elegant, but less animal; Roberta Marquez had more depth than Lamb.
The other short piece is Balanchine’s joyous, bravura Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux (to music from the original Swan Lake score of 1877) — a triumph of sunny virtuosity. This introduced a new Royal Ballet soloist, Alexandra Ansanelli, pretty of mien, deft and speedy in the embroidery steps. Federico Bonelli was at his neatest and springiest. The alternative cast — Marianela Nuñez lilting and radiant, Acosta soaring and hovering effortlessly — was sheer joy.
Ballet Imperial, to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 2 (Philip Gammon the fine pianist), was Balanchine’s tribute to his St Petersburg roots, evoked also in Eugene Berman’s palatial imperial decor and heraldic-style costumes, designed for Covent Garden in 1950. It is a ballet full of choreographic splendour — cornucopian in the opening section, hauntingly beautiful in the vision scene of the middle slow movement. Darcey Bussell and Zenaida Yanowsky pulled out all stops in the first cast, with Rupert Pennefather in courtly support. But the ensemble looked more together at the next performance, with the jewelled perfection of Alina Cojocaru, Lamb glowing with confidence and Bonelli commandingly strong.
The Firebird brought two excellent exponents of the title role — Leanne Benjamin (searingly expressive eyes) and Miyako Yoshida (coldly predatory) — and effective debuts from Edward Watson and Valeri Hristov as Ivan Tsarevich. Last Monday night concluded with a surprise: Jonathan Cope on crutches, robbed by a road accident of his stage farewell, came on to make a graceful speech. The audience’s acclamation acknowledged his career, great achievements and place in our affections.
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Two years ago, Renegade Theatre, from Germany, were a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe with Rumble: the director Markus Michalowski and the choreographer Lorca Renoux’s translation of Romeo and Juliet into the dance language of hip-hop. The show is now back for its first UK tour, and while I enjoyed it (with reservations) in the Edinburgh context, its reappearance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall showed a less effective grasp of narrative and drama than I had remembered.
The scaffolding set depicts inner-city high-rise; the rival gangs, Caps and Montis, are embroiled in a turf war. The jazzy music, by Alexandru Catona, features cello and beatbox. The gangs’ confrontations are conveyed as combative, competitive dance, with prodigious displays of back flips, one-handstands, spins on heads that could bore a hole into the stage, and upended corkscrew revolutions in which bodies hang in the air, apparently powered by rotor-blade legs. This is exhilarating, gripping and witty, but in between, the plot, character and emotional involvement sag.
Another Edinburgh Fringe success is the jolly Jump, a martial- arts extravaganza now running for a London season at the Peacock Theatre. Unlike the familiar Shaolin Monks, with their pretensions to ritual, the Korean company Ye-Gam Inc (artistic director Chul-Ki Choi), from Seoul, offers an out-and-out fun show in a sitcom format — an everyday story of karate folk, you might say.
Grandpa, dad, mum, uncle, daughter and son-in-law are a mad family who live their lives in martial-arts routines. The stunts are amazing and self-parodying, with a full range of grunts, screams and yells. The eclectic score includes snippets of There’s No Place Like Home and Here Comes the Bride, as well as functioning as an accompaniment to silent-film slapstick. The nine brilliantly skilled dance-acrobats have perfect comic timing. In the second half, the house is invaded by two inept burglars — cue for a set piece in which everyone tackles the wrong person.
Kick boxing, stick fencing, swordfighting, pole-twirling all figure. You wonder how these performers just miss each other when what you think you have seen is a boot in the face or abdomen. Never a dull moment; it is a delight.