United Kingdom Górecki, Foskett, Life: Balletboyz®, Sadler’s Wells, London, 20.04.2016. (J.O’D)
Rabbit
Dancers: Andrea Carruciu, Simone Donati, Flavien Esmieu, Marc Galvez, Edward Pearce, Harry Price, Matthew Rees, Jordan Robson, Matthew Sandiford, Bradley Waller
Choreographer: Pontus Lidberg
Music: Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, Kleines Requiem für eine Polka
Lighting Design:James Farncombe
Fiction
Dancers: Andrea Carruciu, Simone Donati, Flavien Esmieu, Marc Galvez, Edward Pearce, Harry Price, Matthew Rees, Jordan Robson, Matthew Sandiford, Bradley Waller
Choreographer: Javier de Frutos
Music: Ben Foskett; P. Jabara Last Dance
Lighting Design: James Farncombe
Words: Ismene Brown with the voices of Jim Carter, Sir Derek Jacobi CBE and Imelda Staunton CBE
Balletboyz® often takes the young manhood of its dancers rather seriously, as if one were being asked to think of them as young men first, as dancers second. The two works in Life. (the title comes with a full stop) may ask this, too, but in both the Balletboyz® dancers show a new finesse.
Pontus Lindberg is a young, Swedish choreographer, film maker and dancer who trained at the Royal Swedish Ballet School. In Rabbit, he dresses the dancers in well-tailored trousers, shirts, waistcoats and ties. With their hipster beards they look like the young men of business to be seen, nowadays, on the Tube – except, that is, when they appear with the heads (and, in one case, the tail) of rabbits.
In a space defined by hanging strips of white material, and to live music by Górecki in which the sound of piano and bells is frequently heard, these always enigmatic figures move with fluid yet angular gestures. Most fluid of all, perhaps, is Bradley Waller, whose body expresses a Prince Siegfried-like yearning that is central to the piece.
Woven into the movement are lifts. At one point these occur simultaneously, like those at the end of Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments. Underlit as it may be, and with a certain clumsiness at the climax, Rabbit is remarkable for the lightness and ease with which its male dancers lift, and are lifted by, each other.
In Fiction, choreographed by Javier de Frutos, the stage itself looks naked and exposed. The side and back walls, and all its lighting equipment, are visible. The dancers, in grey and white, are dressed for the gym rather than the dance studio. They stand behind a horizontally placed, portable bar (not barre) of silver metal. When they begin to move it is to the sound of a man’s voice announcing, with repetitions, the fictional death of choreographer Javier de Frutos at the Balletboyz® premiere ‘last night’.
After this initial announcement, a woman is heard composing the fifty-two year old choreographer’s obituary. This refers to de Frutos as a ‘passionate, Catholic homosexual’ and gives details of his upbringing in Venezuela and subsequent career. In a piece that is about exposure, the obituary recounts the death threats de Frutos received, and the nervous breakdown he suffered, after the performance of his Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez on the Sadler’s Wells stage in 2009.
The dancers respond well to the human voice as soundtrack. They show impatience at the speakers’ hesitations; on the word ‘ballet’ they perform a brief demi-plié and relevé. Strangely, it is during the later musical sections that the work begins to drag. The metal bar is placed on a vertical axis; the dancers move over and under it more freely. Marc Galvez, representing de Frutos himself, is seen as both vulnerable and controlling. The tensions of the all-male group are played out. But while the dancers keep their finesse, the sense of irony the piece started out with is lost. It is, at times, like watching the gym scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with no Jane Russell.
John O’Dwyer