GEORGE PIPER DANCES, QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL, LONDON (27th March 2004). This review first appeared in The Tablet, 3rd April 2004.
In the nineteen thirties, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote a nine-page poem praising ballet as “the revolutionary art of the future”. If he were still alive, he would likely have been disabused of his optimism. The art is at ebb tide, with doubters questioning if a form rooted in the dances of the Bourbon court can still speak eloquently to today’s audiences.
If ballet has a future, it rests with the likes of Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. They describe themselves as “jobbing dancers”. Bored with the security of life in the Royal Ballet, and a constant diet of the nineteenth century classics, they left the company. They now live a more precarious life running their own ensemble, which they call after their second names, George Piper Dances (Queen Elizabeth Hall 23rd- 27th August). They commission new ballet works with a contemporary twist and have attracted an audience to which ballet has had little appeal.
Trevitt is something of a matinee idol, while Nunn has the cheeky opportunism of an East End barrow boy. Their series for Channel 4, Ballet Boyz, a video-diary of dancers’ lives, made them. It established them in public imagination and taught them useful filming skills. Their theatre performances are sandwiched with brief camcorder vignettes. Usually the dancer is known only by the dance. These film-clips fill out the picture with glimpses of their personalities, their playfulness, and of the wear and tear of touring and rehearsal.
Extraordinarily they have persuaded some of the world’s leading dance-makers to create work for them: the three works in their current programme are by choreographers who all have a background in the classics. One, Russell Maliphant, has virtually turned his back on the form, claiming to explore “sculptural possibilities beyond the courtly shapes of ballet”. Christopher Wheeldon, New York City Ballet’s young resident choreographer, works within the classical tradition, giving it contemporary expression, and the third, William Forsythe, the director of Ballet Frankfurt, is torn between a preoccupation with grammar and a frustration with the very limits of dance.
Forsythe, who created Approximate Sonata I, IV for George Piper Dances, eschews prettiness, questions the necessity of the connection between dance and music, and refuses to accept the boundaries of classical grammar. The basic positions of ballet are there, but deconstructed and detached from a ballet landscape. The choreographic mood is disrupted by spoken stage directions and the dancers breaking the spell of the rituals of performance, standing aside occasionally as if in a rehearsal studio. William Trevitt and his partner Monica Zamora dance a tortured asymmetrical duet. Forsythe’s is a bleak, disconnected and rather hopeless world. But his vision of that world compels attention and it has a springiness and a fluency that is visibly rooted in academic dance.
If Forsythe is preoccupied with bending the physics of ballet, Christopher Wheeldon is more preoccupied with its architecture. To many he is the shining hope of the classical tradition, and his work has much more affinity with ballet’s past – with its generous carriages of the arms, its bends and its circles. Wheeldon’s Mesmerics is accomplished and lyrical, but it feels conventional. He has an honest instinct for beauty and for the meeting point of physics and metaphysics. Where Forsythe represents brokenness, Wheeldon portrays beauty, community and grace. But he seems to fall some way short in this work. Perhaps Wheeldon has not suffered enough? Perhaps it was that the score, a collage of excerpts from various Philip Glass quartets, was not demanding enough? In other ballets Wheeldon has risen to the challenge of demanding scores from such composers as Gyorgy Ligeti and James MacMillan. Philip Glass just didn’t seem to touch the vital creative nerve.
The night’s final work from Russell Maliphant, Broken Fall, was just that: a dance essay in the various permutations of broken falls to a score by Barry Adamson that was pure schlock. It was more Cirque du Soleil than art, with underwhelming gymnastics unsupported by any underlying artistic statement – an unusual lapse for a company that gets so much so right.
Details of George Piper Dances’ Spring tour at http://www.gpdances.com/info.htm
In the nineteen thirties, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote a nine-page poem praising ballet as “the revolutionary art of the future”. If he were still alive, he would likely have been disabused of his optimism. The art is at ebb tide, with doubters questioning if a form rooted in the dances of the Bourbon court can still speak eloquently to today’s audiences.
If ballet has a future, it rests with the likes of Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. They describe themselves as “jobbing dancers”. Bored with the security of life in the Royal Ballet, and a constant diet of the nineteenth century classics, they left the company. They now live a more precarious life running their own ensemble, which they call after their second names, George Piper Dances (Queen Elizabeth Hall 23rd- 27th August). They commission new ballet works with a contemporary twist and have attracted an audience to which ballet has had little appeal.
Trevitt is something of a matinee idol, while Nunn has the cheeky opportunism of an East End barrow boy. Their series for Channel 4, Ballet Boyz, a video-diary of dancers’ lives, made them. It established them in public imagination and taught them useful filming skills. Their theatre performances are sandwiched with brief camcorder vignettes. Usually the dancer is known only by the dance. These film-clips fill out the picture with glimpses of their personalities, their playfulness, and of the wear and tear of touring and rehearsal.
Extraordinarily they have persuaded some of the world’s leading dance-makers to create work for them: the three works in their current programme are by choreographers who all have a background in the classics. One, Russell Maliphant, has virtually turned his back on the form, claiming to explore “sculptural possibilities beyond the courtly shapes of ballet”. Christopher Wheeldon, New York City Ballet’s young resident choreographer, works within the classical tradition, giving it contemporary expression, and the third, William Forsythe, the director of Ballet Frankfurt, is torn between a preoccupation with grammar and a frustration with the very limits of dance.
Forsythe, who created Approximate Sonata I, IV for George Piper Dances, eschews prettiness, questions the necessity of the connection between dance and music, and refuses to accept the boundaries of classical grammar. The basic positions of ballet are there, but deconstructed and detached from a ballet landscape. The choreographic mood is disrupted by spoken stage directions and the dancers breaking the spell of the rituals of performance, standing aside occasionally as if in a rehearsal studio. William Trevitt and his partner Monica Zamora dance a tortured asymmetrical duet. Forsythe’s is a bleak, disconnected and rather hopeless world. But his vision of that world compels attention and it has a springiness and a fluency that is visibly rooted in academic dance.
If Forsythe is preoccupied with bending the physics of ballet, Christopher Wheeldon is more preoccupied with its architecture. To many he is the shining hope of the classical tradition, and his work has much more affinity with ballet’s past – with its generous carriages of the arms, its bends and its circles. Wheeldon’s Mesmerics is accomplished and lyrical, but it feels conventional. He has an honest instinct for beauty and for the meeting point of physics and metaphysics. Where Forsythe represents brokenness, Wheeldon portrays beauty, community and grace. But he seems to fall some way short in this work. Perhaps Wheeldon has not suffered enough? Perhaps it was that the score, a collage of excerpts from various Philip Glass quartets, was not demanding enough? In other ballets Wheeldon has risen to the challenge of demanding scores from such composers as Gyorgy Ligeti and James MacMillan. Philip Glass just didn’t seem to touch the vital creative nerve.
The night’s final work from Russell Maliphant, Broken Fall, was just that: a dance essay in the various permutations of broken falls to a score by Barry Adamson that was pure schlock. It was more Cirque du Soleil than art, with underwhelming gymnastics unsupported by any underlying artistic statement – an unusual lapse for a company that gets so much so right.
Details of George Piper Dances’ Spring tour at http://www.gpdances.com/info.htm
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