New Works: Royal Ballet Festival of New Chorography. Royal Opera House, Main Stage, 15 February 2024 – Maggie Watson reviews

On Thursday 15th February, four completely different new works premiered on the Royal Opera House main stage, as part of the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New Choreography. It was an evening of exciting variety, showcasing styles that ranged from ‘neo-classical’ to ‘contemporary’, and from unemotional abstraction to warm theatricality, in a programme that began with Gemma Bond’s Boundless to full orchestral accompaniment, and closed with Jessica Lang’s Twinkle to solo piano. Bond and Lang made full, but contrasting, use of the Royal Ballet’s traditional strengths as a leading ‘classical’ ballet company, acting as bookends to a programme in which the second and third pieces, by Joshua Junker and Mthuthuzeli November respectively, required the dancers to work in very different styles.

 

Leanne Benjamin: built for ballet, an autobiography, Leanne Benjamin with Sarah Crompton – Maggie Watson reviews

Leanne Benjamin arrived in London in 1980, aged sixteen, to attend the Royal Ballet School, and became a principal dancer with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet (SWRB) at twenty-three.  Her career in dance has been exceptional but there is nothing complacent about this memoir, co-authored with writer and broadcaster Sarah Crompton.  Benjamin is as disarmingly open about her failures as she is about her successes, whether they relate to her dancing, her decisions, or her behaviour.  Punctuality (or rather her lack of it) was a continual challenge:  she missed the opportunity to be promoted to soloist by arriving late on stage during a performance of Les Patineurs; on tour in India, she took a sightseeing trip and arrived at the theatre too late to step in and replace an injured principal dancer.   On the other hand Benjamin candidly does not regret a ‘silly’ decision to rehearse Romeo and Juliet with Peter Schaufuss in secret, behind the back of her director Peter Wright at SWRB, because it gave her a unique opportunity to work with Frederick Ashton. 

 

Darcey Bussell interviewed by Nick Higham, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford Literary Festival 30th March 2019 – Maggie Watson reports

Nick Higham’s interview with Darcey Bussell in the Sheldonian Theatre was the only dance-related event in this year’s Oxford Literary Festival, and it was sold out. I was sitting right at the top, next to a family with two small girls, who were very anxious about whether they would be able to see. Happily, we turned out to be on the best side of the Gallery, and had a good view of Bussell, who seemed to be channelling her inner Audrey Hepburn, in slacks, pumps and a polka-dot blouse.

Higham opened the discussion by talking about her book Darcey Bussell: Evolved, which is a collection of images of Bussell in locations ranging from the top of the Albert Memorial to the London Eye. Higham asked what it is like to be a photographer’s muse, to which Bussell replied that it is part of the job of promoting her art form.

 

Sylvia: The Royal Ballet at Royal Opera House, Saturday matinées 2 & 16 December 2017 – Maggie Watson reviews

These two performances of Sylvia, Ashton’s flawed but lovely ballet, felt like Christmas presents in beautifully presented parcels, each containing completely different interpretations of the leading roles. I saw Lauren Cuthbertson and Reece Clarke as Sylvia and Aminta on 2 December, followed by Natalia Osipova and Vadim Muntagirov on December 16.

 

Wrights & Wrongs: my life in dance, by Peter Wright with Paul Arrowsmith – Maggie Watson reviews

This is ‘not a conventional autobiography’ but it is a fascinating and inspiring account of 75 years of work in dance and theatre. Immensely humorous, Wright seems to have known almost everybody in the ballet world, and he conjures up vivid images of dips in the freezing January sea with Henry Danton at Eastbourne in the 1940s, Princess Margaret backstage at the Birmingham Hippodrome holding her breath to avoid the whiff from the gents’ loo, or of Michael Somes who could be ‘very difficult’, ‘particularly at full moon’.

For those of us outside the professional ballet world, the book sometimes ‘joins the dots’, and fills the gaps that other, more discreet, accounts have left in obscurity. I imagine that Wright’s colleagues and acquaintances will have looked for their names in the index with some trepidation, for he is almost as frank about the living as he is about the dead.

 

Romeo and Juliet: Royal Ballet at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 26 September 2015, evening – Maggie Watson reviews

Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet had casting problems right from the start, when Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable famously gave way to Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. On Saturday, the cast change was due to injury, and Natalia Osipova was replaced by Sarah Lamb, partnered by Vadim Muntagirov. Lamb and Osipova seem to me to be at opposite poles, the one being a warm, passionate risk-taker, the other cool, restrained and exquisitely accurate. It cannot be easy to perform knowing that the majority of the audience originally booked to see another very different dancer.

 

Royal Ballet in Raven Girl and Symphony in C at Royal Opera House, Saturday 8 June 2013 – Maggie Watson reviews

Wayne McGregor’s Raven Girl is a brave experiment with narrative form, which springs from an exciting collaboration between author, designers, composer and choreographer.  Wonderful but subtle use of cinematic effect enhances the sepia-shaded set, and the choreography makes full use of the extraordinary technical capacity of the Royal Ballet’s principal dancers.

McGregor asked Audrey Niffenegger for a “new dark fairy tale”, and the result is a gloomy and sometimes macabre story, which includes a strong element of magic.  But magic does not make a fairy tale:  to be true to the genre, the story must, firstly, address what Bruno Bettelheim calls our “existential anxieties and dilemmas”, and, secondly, offer us a solution to them.  This, the ballet fails to do. 

 

Royal Ballet’s The Nutcracker broadcast – Maggie Watson reviews

Royal Ballet Nutcracker, broadcast live to the Phoenix Cinema, Oxford. Thursday 13 December 2012

This was the most enjoyable ROH – to- cinema transmission that I’ve seen. The children among the regular ballet audience gave the auditorium the buzz that’s sometimes lacking, and it was fun to be able to see detailed acting in the party scene close-up (not to mention Drosselmeyer’s magic tricks, which for the slightly myopic work better on screen than from the back of the Amphitheatre).

 

The gender agenda – Susie Crow reflects on recent choreography by female and male choreographers

Writing about the Female Choreographers’ Collective performance in October whetted my curiosity as to what might be discernible differences between the work of female and male choreographers; I approached other performances viewed recently with my antennae thus attuned…

To the Old Fire Station on 20^th October to see Cecilia MacFarlane’s reflection on the tragic accidental death of her son “I’ll leave you to yourself then…”.  A small, pugnacious figure with cropped white hair, Cecilia began encased in a fragile egg of white mesh with blood red ribbons, painfully hatching, her face contorted as she slowly emerged. 

 

Viscera, Infra and Fool’s Paradise at the Royal Opera House – Kate Alford reviews

Viscera/Infra/Fool’s Paradise Royal Ballet Mixed Bill, Saturday 3rd November 2012

This triple bill opened with Viscera, a work originally created on Miami City Ballet and presented for the first time by the Royal Ballet. Choreographed by the newly appointed Artist in Residence Liam Scarlett to Lowell Liebermann’s Piano Concerto No.1 this was a thrilling, exhilarating ballet.