ENB in London - John Percival

“Melody on the Move”, “The Canterville Ghost”
Choreographers: Michael Corder, David Dawson, Christopher Hampson, Will Tuckett
English National Ballet
Sadler's Wells Theatre,
London. UK
March 6 – 10, 2007

by John Percival
copyright ©2007, John Percival

Four English choreographers provided the programmes for English National Ballet's spring tour. I could more happily have done without “The Canterville Ghost”, a supposed family entertainment drawing upon a novella by Oscar Wilde. But what Will Tuckett and his team have made of it insults that fine writer. The plot becomes a ghastly muddle, characters lack plausibility, and another Irish playwright, Michael West, has provided a plodding voice-over text to explain what's happening. Martin Ward's score is boringly repetitious and it never becomes clear why Dick Bird's design places the sketchily depicted castle behind a false old-style proscenium. Tuckett provides lots of steps, each more pointless than the next. In the cast I saw, Begona Cao looked pretty and danced appealingly as the heroine Virginia. None of the other dancers left much impression but that's not their fault.

Much more enjoyable was a triple bill with attractive music, lots of dancing and excellent casts. Michael Corder's “Melody on the Move”, which also lends its name to the whole show, is a welcome revival of a 2003 hit. It comprises eight entertaining episodes to British light music written between 1930 and 1960, played as in one-time popular BBC programme called Housewives' Choice. Mark Bailey's design provides a giant radio (or “wireless set” as we used to call them) at the back, from which the large cast appear as needed. The dancers, happily, seem as amused as we are by the whole thing.

The other works were both London premieres. David Dawson, although a Londoner by birth, has worked mostly abroad (he's now resident choreographer in Dresden), so it is good to see one of his ballets here. This one was created on the Dutch National Ballet and has also been danced by the Royal New Zealand Ballet. He calls it “A Million Kisses to my Skin”, a phrase he uses for the bliss a dancer may sometimes feel in their work. Having chosen Bach's first piano concerto, he says, for its rhythm and darkness (an odd description, but never mind), he makes the slow movement a triple duet begun and ended by Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur, who are joined by Elena Glurdjidze and Dmitri Gruzdyev, Erina Takahashi and Fabian Reimar. Three further women participate handsomely in the ballet's other demanding sequences, and the audience was clearly pleased with the piece.

Christopher Hampson, a former member of ENB before turning freelance, created “Sinfonietta Giocosa” recently for the Atlanta Ballet, exploiting the speed and energy of their dancers, and has now transferred those demands to its ENB casts. Working from Bohuslav Martinu's music, he deploys a cast of six women, six men, mixing all ranks from principals to corps but demanding great flexibility, speed, and enthusiasm from all of them. The ballet starts and finishes with the full ensemble in formal patterns, but Hampson goes on to set one dancer after another in solos, duets or trios, so inventive and often unexpected that successively we are led to think of each one as the lead. A truly exhilarating performance is the outcome, bringing life to music that the choreographer describes as a rhythmic jigsaw puzzle. It's a ballet I'd enjoy seeing again.

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