I didn’t quite prop up my eyelids with matchsticks in the manner of a fondly remembered Tom and Jerry cartoon, but it was a near thing. No blame attaches to NDT’s dancers, let me say straight off. They are, and always have been, a sleek and robust company — fine physical specimens of both sexes — who dance “contemporary ballet” (the classical training always evident, though the mode is transformed). Little wonder that NDT has long been a top international commodity and a regular attraction in Edinburgh. However, the sex-appeal component — successful as it is — has become a cliché, especially with the bare-chested men. NDT is the company that most likes to undress, partially or totally (going back to the 1970s, when its first piece involving nudity was sabotaged at Sadler’s Wells by someone cleverly scattering the stage with itching powder).
Returning to the Edinburgh programme (which packed the house and was wildly applauded), what am I grumbling about? It was an evening devoted to four pieces spanning a decade’s output by NDT’s resident choreographers of today, the former company dancers and husband-and-wife team of Paul Lightfoot (English) and Sol Leon (Spanish). Such is their unity of purpose, they are often credited with their surnames joined by a hyphen, and they produce the designs as well as the choreography. They don’t compose the music, though: the scores for two of the works, opening and closing the bill, were by Philip Glass, and this played a big part in the soporific effect.
At 45 minutes, Silent Screen got us off to an interminable start. (Silent Scream might have been a better title.) The visuals are striking — a triptych of screens for a wash of projections: a rocky seashore, a forest, a shadow-casting window, all black and white. It was clever at the beginning when, of three figures apparently on stage, one turned out not to be — walking away on film to the sea. But the dance action plunged into angular, stressful movement accompanied by — in fact — silent screams and much angst, all quite enigmatic, but wearingly so.
The final piece, Signing Off, about partings and farewells, revisited similar territory in similar dress styles: many comings and goings through billowing black curtains, all heavily portentous and inflatedly unedifying, though the dancers were superbly skilled.
The middle pieces were ostensibly comic. Sh-Boom, to popular songs of the 1930s and 1940s (unidentified in the programme, although one could hardly not recognise Vera Lynn with Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart), was an ironic comment — in dance terms — on love and romance. It involves men in their undies and forceful women in black dresses, who at one point shine torches on the desperate condition of a chap who has haplessly lost all his clothes (as one might in a dream). He eventually eludes them, flicking his willy (I kid you not). The companion so-called funny piece, Shutters Shut, had a couple semaphoring madly, a language that twitchingly matched the verbal gobbledegook of a Gertrude Stein poem — the only interest supplied by hearing Stein’s own, surprisingly pleasant voice reading it. Cumulatively, then, a tedious evening indeed.
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Then back to London, and into Sadler’s Wells breezed the exuberant Ballet Nacional de Cuba, the creation of the venerable Alicia Alonso, a near-divinity in Cuba, who favoured us by joining her dancers for curtain calls. The first programme, Magia de la Danza, was a compilation from most of the classics — heavy going, as one famous pas de deux succeeded another in a rather flimsy stage setting.
As expected, the Cubans scored a big success with their second show, the full-length Don Quixote, in which Alonso’s editings fit well into the Petipa-Gorsky original. The company danced with tremendous zest in threadbare decors. On Tuesday, we had an effective Don from Miguelangel Blanco (a more dancy role than usual) and a handsomely matched Espada and Mercedes in Carlos Quenedit and Yolanda Correa.
At every opportunity, all eyes were on the leading couple, and an impressive pair they were: the boyishly engaging and virtuosic Joel Carreño (a member of a distinguished Cuban ballet dynasty) as Basilio, and, in the star ballerina role of Kittri, the remarkable Viengsay Valdes, with a firecracker performance of outstanding technical brilliance — so dazzling, it seems churlish to complain (but I do) of her self-indulgence. All right, she has the knack of balancing, rock steady, on one pointe for impossible ages, while all else waits, but after several such displays, you feel once would have been enough.
Altogether, though, a great evening.