United Kingdom Ghost Light (John Neumeier) / Firebird (Glen Tetley): Dancers of London City Ballet (Artistic Director: Christopher Marney). Sadler’s Wells, London, 23.10.2026. (JO’D)
Ghost Light
Choreography – John Neumeier
Music – Franz Schubert
Dancers – Alina Cojocaru, Josue Gomez, Joseph Taylor, Nicolas Gläsmann, Samuele Barzaghi, Arthur Wille, Yuria Isaka, Ellie Young, Jimin Kim, Hui-Wen Peng, Sahel Flora Pascual, Arthur Henderson, Siméon Sorange-Félicité, Noah Cosgriff, Tatyana Meijer
Firebird
Choreography – Glen Tetley
Music – Igor Stravinsky
Dancers – Ellie Young, Arthur Henderson, Joseph Taylor, Tatyana Meijer, Sahel Flora Pascual, Jimin Kim, Arthur Willie, Josue Gomez, Samuele Barzaghi, Siméon Sorange-Félicité, Noah Cosgriff, Yuria Isaka, Hui-Wen Peng, Vidya Cannonier-Watson
As the Sadler’s Wells audience takes its seats, the curtain is already up. The stage, extended to cover the orchestra pit, is bare except for a chair on its side and, at some distance, a floor lamp with a naked bulb. John Neumeier’s Ghost Light (2020) begins in silence as Alina Cojocaru, in tutu and pointe shoes (but with loose hair), enters from the wings and moves with hesitant steps towards the chair. This is the intriguing and somewhat challenging start of a ballet about love, longing and loss, which will keep the attention of its audience rapt for the next fifty-five minutes.
Alina Cojocaru breaks out in agitated speech. She might be Odette in a state of confusion or distress. No sooner has her Prince (Josue Gomez) appeared, and the piano music of Franz Schubert begun to be heard on the soundtrack, than they both exit. Ghost Light is a ballet of entrances and exits, and of ‘scenes’ that overlap. Despite the significant presence of Cojocaru (in duets with Joseph Taylor, above all) and of Francesca Velicu, the focus is on the male dancers. It is the men, in contemporary dress and often semi-naked, who seem to occupy the stage; the woman, for the most part, pass across it.
That is exactly what a woman dressed as the sylph from La Sylphide (1836) does, with the arm movements of the sylph, at the back of the stage, as two men (one of them semi-naked) perform a duet at the front. A reference, perhaps, to a first ballet to deal with love, longing and loss: the sylph dies; James, the ‘hero’, loses both her and the woman he was supposed to marry.
The music is always Schubert’s, to which the choreography always responds. Different moods are created through the colour of a single costume: pale-blue, purple, deep red. If, during a career that began in the 1960s, John Neumeier has devised a searching and expressive choreographic language in which the dancers’ arms frequently extend towards their objects of desire, part of that expressiveness comes from his use of stillness, and of the look.
It was hard to believe, watching Ghost Light, that London City Ballet in its present form is only three years old. Its dancers (Ellie Young, Arthur Henderson, Joseph Taylor) were no less accomplished in Glen Tetley’s Firebird (1981). It was not their fault that after the work that preceded it, the choreographic language of this ballet seemed straightforward and conventional.
The original Firebird of 1910 is transposed from its Russian fairytale setting to what looks like North America of the 19th century. The Firebird (Ellie Young) appears at first to be a young woman oppressed by the black-clad leader of a sect (Arthur Henderson). Ivan (Joseph Taylor) frees her. Stravinsky’s music builds to its grand climax on the soundtrack. On the stage, smiling dancers in white clothes, Ivan among them, gather to celebrate the wedding of hero and heroine. Yet the ballet may not be so conventional after all. The unsmiling bride’s rigid demeanour could suggest the fear, or knowledge, that she is exchanging one kind of oppression for another.
John O’Dwyer
Featured Image: Ellie Young and Joseph Taylor in Glen Tetley’s Firebird © Photography by ASH