Northern Ballet - Three Short Ballets
Northern Ballet’s latest triple bill successfully fuses a nearly 50-year-old classic by Rudi van Dantzig to a newly minted and substantial work by Mthuthuzeli November and a 5 minute shorty from Kristen McNally.
Sarah Chun and Harris Beattie in Mthuthuzeli November’s “Fools” (sadly no pictures of the reviewed cast are available). © Emily Nuttall
Northern Ballet
Three Short Ballets: Four Last Songs, Victory Dance, Fools
★★★★✰
Leeds, Stanley & Audrey Burton Theatre
7 September 2024, matinee
www.northernballet.com
northernballet.com/theatre
It’s autumn, and hence time for another triple bill from Northern Ballet (NB) under the “Three Short Ballets” banner and mixing an established work with interesting new commissions. The bill premiered on Friday night, but I caught the Saturday matinee with the alternative cast strutting their stuff for the first time, and I’m glad I made the trip up from London to Leeds.
I can’t conceive of a show opener much more monumental than Rudi van Dantzig’s Four Last Songs - for once it’s a ballet that truly lives up to the marketing: “Four Last Songs is a breathtaking expression of love, loss, and the beauty of the human experience.” The music is the driver here, and it’s Richard Strauss’s response, in his 84th year (just before he died) to three poems by Hermann Hesse and one by Joseph von Eichendorff. The common theme is the approach of death, the calm acceptance of its coming and a reflection on a life well lived. The clue to its construction is in the title: it consists of four songs written for soprano and orchestra, and was premiered in 1950.
Created in 1977 for the Dutch National Ballet, each song is centred on a pas de deux, so four couples in total, with an Angel character hovering around and gently wafting the action towards an inevitable, if understandable and satisfying, conclusion. The designs by Toer van Schayk feature classic flowing costumes in muted pastel colours and a backcloth of stylized open rolling countryside that, as the poems progress, tracks from a sunny scene to one bathed by a red setting sun.
Van Dantzig may only have been 44 when he made Four Last Songs, but he gets right under the skin of the music and poems to show gloriously and nobly, how we all would want to approach our inescapable end. The choreography has a smooth and leisurely surface, as does the singing, and yet van Dantzig packs in many smaller steps that make it all glide more effortlessly - so clever. The four pas de deux are subtly different but pick up on companionship, even little disagreements, mutual support and gentle, romantic love. It’s a work one will find more in each time it’s seen, and a shame I have to wait until January, for the company visit to London’s Royal Opera House, to unearth more. The casting was interesting, and the matinee featured a young cast, predominantly artists from the most junior ranks (or Coryphées, as NB refers to this level). They did a fine job in work that would normally be the province of soloist and principal dancers. It’s a touching work, and the dancers did indeed touch us all. All in all, it was an outstanding acquisition by artistic director Federico Bonelli and one that fits the dramatic chops of the company perfectly. Bravo to all involved.
I feel like I’ve been tracking Kristen McNally, the Royal Ballet’s dancing choreographer, since 1542 (well, the early 2000s), since her arrestingly quirky work first appeared in short Draft Works (and similar) programmes for insiders at the Royal Opera House. And since then I’ve been waiting for a real breakthrough piece that announces her full arrival as a choreographer of consequence. And as I travelled up from London, my fingers were crossed that the appropriately named Victory Dance might be the piece that boots things up a level. It is a terrific work, but at 5 minutes, it firmly follows the delightfully short-‘n’-quirky tradition - I think Northern’s Bonelli missed a big trick in not commissioning something longer.
Victory Dance is an inclusive work for three dancers, including the disabled Joe Powell-Main, who uses a wheelchair. McNally’s note about the piece is disarmingly simple, “A moment of celebration. For anything that goes before and anything that comes after.” Yep, and celebration it is to Ezra Collective’s upbeat and fast-paced jazzy track of the same name. There are smiles all over, not least from Powell-Main, who knowingly winks and beams at the audience in triumph as he speeds around and is unceremoniously manipulated by Kevin Poeung and Yu Wakizuka. And I love that they coax him out of his wheelchair into their upright world and then join his world in a section where the three sit on the floor. It’s a pleasingly exhausting and winning response to a 5-minute call to action. I hope NB maintains the link and that McNally is invited back to create something more substantial.
It’s the third time that Ballet Black’s Mthuthuzeli November has been invited to create on Northern, and he’s delivered a cracking dramatic ballet for them. Fools is easiest thought of as a take on Romeo and Juliet, but here, based on R.L. Peteni’s South African novel Hill of Fools, where the forbidden love is across the divide of feuding communities/tribes. The story is distilled down to three main characters, the Thembo Lead (Romeo), the female Hlubi tribe lead (Juliet) and her relative the male Hlubi tribe lead (Tybalt). Company dancers add full texture as the respective tribes, all in quality evocative multipurpose set designs (November and Steve Wilkins) and costumes (Yann Seabra).
Rachael Gillespie and Kevin Poeung did a stellar job as the lead characters in Fools, believably falling in love and then showing the growing relationship despite the violence against it. Gillespie wears pointe shoes but it’s a piece that comfortably fuses ballet with contemporary and the pulsating energy of African tribal movement. It’s hardly a spoiler, but it all ends with a huge fight and the crude stabbing to death of Romeo by the Tybalt character, danced by the commanding George Liang. At 40 minutes, it feels about 5 minutes too long, and the second duet and especially the final fight could be shortened a little. But ultimately, as is, I’m full of admiration for the commission, which, like Last Songs, fits NB like a glove and is one of November’s best and most readable works to date.