Only a few weeks after Ivan Putrov staged his potpourri programme Men in Motion at Sadler’s Wells, a celebration of the beauty of male dancing, he has come up with a second edition “featuring Sergei Polunin”, as it declares under the title. Polunin is more than a feature. Having abruptly left the Royal Ballet, he is the raison d’être of this show — an eager collaborator with Putrov, his older friend and mentor.
In addition to the dazzling athletic-expressive solo Narcisse, repeated from the earlier Men in Motion, we saw him in two new guises. To open the bill, he was the piebald-costumed Faune in Nijinsky’s historic L’Après-midi d’un faune, to Debussy’s score (handsomely played by Richard Bernas’s orchestra).
The cast of nymphs was reduced to three. The sequence and angularities of Nijinsky’s choreography were fairly represented, but there was a definite feeling of something missing, this being any real sense of conviction in the performances. So it failed. This is the centenary year of Faune; revivals by ENB and the Rambert company may fare better.
Polunin’s own first essay in choreography (with the assistance of the Royal Ballet’s Valentino Zucchetti) had its world premiere — a solo, James Dean, exploring the troubled mind and character of the tragic film idol. He takes off into surges of hurtling, soaring and spinning in the air, interspersed with staggering about in the grip of despair, and deriving symbolic solace from an overcoat on a chair. Then he makes a frantic dash across the stage in almost total darkness, and we ended with the sound of screeching brakes and a car crash, with a spotlight on the abandoned coat. There was a ripple of laughter in the audience. For all Polunin’s sincerity of motive, we must say better luck next time.
Putrov himself, in tight white wig and period tunic, danced Leonid Jacobson’s solo Vestris, a character study inspired by the 18th-century virtuoso (“the god of the dance”). Nimble footwork and a courtly elegance were woven into preens, grimaces, shrugs and snatches of mime — a puzzling mixture to which, in 1969, the then young Baryshnikov, on whom the piece was created, doubtless brought an easier comic flair.
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Two guests from the Royal Danish Ballet also gave brief solos. Tim Matiakis danced Round About Tim, made for him by Jorma Elo, a zippy little number that felt like a sketch for something more extensive; and a healthily bare-chested Andrew Bowman in Dying Swan, by Tim Rushton, circled fluidly and scattered white feathers. Odd. Dana Fouras and Jesse Kovarsky scythed their limbs in pinpoints of light as Russell Maliphant’s Two x Two made its reliably mesmerising effects. We rounded off the evening with Putrov and two dancers from Spain’s Compañia Nacional de Danza in Nacho Duato’s athletic, charmingly witty trio Remanso, to jaunty melodies by Granados. Certainly an agreeable ending, though the bits-and-pieces nature of the programme left the feeling that it lacked a logical destination to reach.
Ballet Black, Cassa Pancho’s admirable small troupe of young black and Asian classical dancers, now in its 11th year, is touring a programme of four new and contrasted commissions, inaugurated as usual at the ROH Linbury Studio Theatre: an intriguing duet from Jonathan Watkins; a solo from Jonathan Goddard; a denser, emotion-charged quartet of complex relationships, Captured, by Martin Lawrance, to Shostakovich; and, as the climax, a clever narrative piece for all seven dancers, Storyville, to Kurt Weill music, by Christopher Hampson, in zestful, dramatically effective choreography, with a witty dash of vaudeville. Cira Robinson is engaging, subtle and moving as the innocent Nola, who is lured away from true love by the empty glamour of nightclub dancing and dies a victim of a sadistic madam, Lulu White, and her accomplice, Mack (the Knife), via the medium of voodoo. High quality.