Scottish Ballet on Tour in Soto | Petipa | Squire | Laplane quad bill
Scottish Ballet is doing a mini-tour of three recent works, including a premiere, plus a fine bit of classical froth - the Grand Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker…
Scottish Ballet in Cayetano Soto’s ‘Schachmatt’. © Andy Ross
Scottish Ballet
Scottish Ballet on Tour: Schachmatt (Checkmate), Nutcracker Grand Pas de Deux, Echo Echo, Dextera
★★★★✰
Dunfermline, Alhambra Theatre
17 October 2024
scottishballet.co.uk
alhambradunfermline.com
Good to see Scottish Ballet striking out from their usual touring circuit with a two-night visit to the Alhambra in Dunfermline. What’s rather glorious about the Alhambra is that as you enter the stalls, you immediately spot an auditorium-wide bar at the back of all the seating - it’s huge, and certainly no wondering where you go for an interval drink here! At 1200+ seats, the Alhambra is a fine size, with good sight lines and comfy seats. I hope they visit again. Next month Scottish tour the same bill to The Beacon in Greenock - sadly I can’t be there, but I think you should for what proves a splendid mixed bill.
Hard to think of a better curtain raiser to a night of ballet than Cayetano Soto‘s Schachmatt (Checkmate) - it’s a fast-paced and disarmingly humorous slice of bang-up-to-date dance and yet with its feet firmly planted in the theatre and TV of 60 years ago. Ten dancers (five of each sex), identically and oddly clad in riding helmets, shorts and long black socks, prance and shimmy in tight unison to an eclectic soundtrack that starts by conjuring images of groovy 1960s Go-Go dancers and dissolves into a bit of a ’walk’ on the wild side. There’s a good dollop of exciting Bob Fosse physicality on display, but it’s all so deliciously camp and yet delivered with dead-pan reverence by the dancers. At 18 minutes, Schachmatt is perfect length, leaving you smilingly disorientated and wanting to see it immediately run again. It’s a great calling card for the company.
From the gloriously ridiculous to the gloriously sublime Grand Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker, or come to think of it, a piece of dance just as absurd and off the wall in its own way. The Nutcracker music may only have been recorded, but it remains as luminous and uplifting as ever and a reminder that Christmas and the company’s reworked Nutcracker are just around the corner. It was particularly fascinating to see the pairing of Jessica Fyfe and James Garrington, a principal and an artist two years into his professional career and still learning such elevated material/partnering. They made a jolly good fist of it if some of the timing got a little wayward at the very end. Sometimes you sigh at the bliss of things done faultlessly, and sometimes you smile and will on the fine efforts of dancers coming through at the start of their career, and Garrington is full of great promise as a danseur noble. They rightly received thunderous applause and bravo to them both for the joy they delivered.
One of the major draws in making the trip to see Scottish was catching a premiere. Madeline Squire is a first artist with Scottish but won a choreographic award during her time at English National Ballet School and, following several smaller space and film works (which sadly I’ve somehow missed), Echo Echo arrives, her first main-stage commission. A duet to 8 minutes of Caleb Arredondo’s haunting and looping saxophone, it follows a formal classical ballet pas de deux structure in having the pair work together, each separately and finally together again. But in all other respects, this is thoroughly modern, with almost giddy movement beneath some sharp lighting. There is a restless precision here, as Squire often isolates and moves limbs independently. It could look robotic, but it has an engagingly quirky human quality. All up, it is a pacy bit of business with some neat lifts as well. Card marked, I look forward to seeing what Squire does next.
Another Scottish Ballet first soloist who has subsequently gone on to become a very successful independent choreographer is Sophie Laplane. Spotted and developed by artistic director Christopher Hampson, she is, in one of the world’s worst-kept secrets, working on a full-length ballet to be unveiled next summer, but not for me to break embargoes. Until then, we get to see her 45-minute Dextera again - originally premiered 6½ years ago, it was an immediate hit with audiences and critics alike. See my original review for more details, but in short form, it’s a work celebrating creative hands and the craft and skilled work they produce. Put like that, it sounds rather worthy and craftsman-like itself, but actually, as a piece, I summed it up as, “An absolute corker, fizzing with ideas!” Dextera is really rather witty at times and deliciously plays with gender stereotypes, all to glorious Mozart. But beyond the wit, there is great depth here and an abundance of solos, duets and group work that I’m sure Laplane will revisit and develop in future pieces.