What will audiences make of the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill? It’s hard to imagine what universe could comfortably embrace Wayne McGregor’s awesome Chroma and Kenneth MacMillan’s intractable Different Drummer. They inhabit such mutually exclusive worlds that seeing them one after the other is a jolt. Still, if it’s meat you want on your ballet mixed bill then this will do it. The fact that MacMillan’s heavy-duty The Rite of Spring is also part of the deal is icing on the cake.
The programme hits you like an exhilarating slap, courtesy of Chroma, which begins it. We first saw McGregor’s ballet in 2006 but its ability to dazzle hasn’t diminished with familiarity. Joby Talbot’s score, part strident orchestration of the White Stripes, part his own more meditative compositions, is immediately seductive. And the view, courtesy of John Pawson’s soaring light-box set and Lucy Carter’s gorgeous transformative lighting, is breathtaking.
McGregor’s hyperflexible choreography, written for deep within the body, isn’t on pointe but it trades on the extreme agility and lithe muscularity of classical dancers. What enhances its driving abstraction is its resonant contrasts of mood and its lush emotional satisfaction. What it does for the Royal Ballet’s men is amazing, especially Federico Bonelli and Eric Underwood, who are reborn; and the woman look pretty sensational too. No wonder Chroma recently won a Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for choreography.
We haven’t seen Different Drummer in 15 years, and there will undoubtedly be some eager to experience MacMillan’s overheated Expressionist treatment of Woyzeck. Different Drummer (1984) has never been an easy work to take on board, and its structural flaws, freewheeling narrative jumps between real and unreal, and abstruse religious symbolism still grate. But B?chner’s tale of a soldier who kills his lover in a jealous rage does possess an undeniable force in MacMillan’s hands, despite the awkward ineffectuality of so much of the choreography (set to Webern and Schoenberg). Leading an impressive first cast, Edward Watson put body and soul into his brilliantly tortured representation of Woyzeck, the soldier brutalised and victimised by a sadistic military. Leanne Benjamin offered the most beautiful dancing as Woyzeck’s ill-fated lover Marie, and showed yet again why she is the foremost interpreter of MacMillan’s often hidden agendas.
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There is certainly no hidden agenda in his 1962 treatment of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Its impact is straightforward and visceral. Impressive for its sheer numbers (a cast of 46), thrilling music, Sidney Nolan’s aboriginal designs and the instinctive power of its primitive dance (led by Tamara Rojo as the Chosen Maiden), MacMillan’s creation still knocks ‘em dead, even if it veers wildly between silly and sublime.
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