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Showing posts with label ballet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ballet. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
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I don't know much about ballet, but I know what I like. And I like Ballet Black. Founded by Cassa Pancho, the company's goal is to grant black and Asian dancers an opportunity to shine. Sadly, black and Asian dancers are overlooked for major roles, Carlos Acosta perhaps putting it best: "There is this mentality, especially with directors, that a black ballerina in the middle of a flock of white swans would somehow alter the harmony."
Ballet Black not only tours shows that showcase their extraordinarily talented dancers but run the popular Ballet Black Junior School and an Associate Programme (with 400 members), in the hope that they can inspire a new generation of dancers.
I know all this because I attended an open rehearsal for the show. There I got to know the dancers as human beings rather than as unapproachable epitomes of physical perfection, got to see the construction of the choreography and heard explanations of pretty much everything they was going on on stage. This is invaluable for a neophyte like me - ballet's always seemed like a world where everyone assumes you know your arrière from your sissonne fermée (thanks Google).
After very much enjoying the rehearsal I was eager how the sketch I'd seen would translate to a full picture. Divided into three separate pieces, two short/one long, the show is constructed on the basis of 'something for everyone'. Indeed, each segment was markedly different from the others, offering a mixture of populist theatre and the avant-garde.
First up was Arthur Pita's Cristaux. I'd thought that Ballet Black would ease us in with something warm and personable, but Cristaux quickly proves anything but. Soundtracked by the jangling glockenspiel loops of Steve Reich's Drumming Part III, this is a coolly minimalist, almost mechanically precise demonstration of what the company is capable of.
Dancer Cira Robinson emerges in a crystal festooned tutu and tiara, the spotlight casting rays of light from it that gently discoball their way across the awed audience. It's an impressively attention grabbing introduction, only equalled by the moment when a gigantic crystal pendulum dramatically whooshes across the stage, apparently threatening to decapitate the dancers below. Robinson eventually intertwines with Mthuthuzeli November, the two mesmerisingly falling in and out of synchronisation - their motions occasionally giving the illusion that the two somehow physically meld.
As it ends it feels as if the audience collectively exhales - there's a general sense of "wow". Christopher Marney's To Begin, Begin has big shoes to fill. This is anchored by two elements, a large sheet of cobalt silk that weightlessly flutters around the stage and the magnetic stage presence of Sayaka Ichikawa. The two work through a series of eye-catching configurations; ranging from a costume to bondage to scenery. Contrasting the loose chaos of the silk with the precision of the dancers is effective, but lacks some of the oomph of the preceding piece.
After the internal is the main course: Christopher Hampson's Storyville. It tells the story of Nola (Cira Robinson) a young girl lost in New Orleans. She's a talented and natural dancer, but falls under the sway of salubrious nightclub owners Lulu and Mack. Gradually she sinks into a life of vice, the only ray of light in her life the love of an honest sailor.
Using a variety of Kurt Weill songs, there's a Cabaret-esque seedy tinge throughout, with Nola's plunge into the metaphorical (and later literal) underworld ably conveyed by smart choreography and a carefully chosen group of symbolic props. Highlights are when Nola's childhood doll is used to puppeteer her, voodoo style. As it's dropped Robinson perfectly and dramatically collapses onto the stage. Also impressive is a later scene of drunken hedonism, in which we see the interesting juxtaposition of drunken clumsiness and ballet, the dancers obviously relishing the challenge.
That said, though Storyville is an excellent showcase for the company and oozes style, I didn't feel half the emotional heft that I felt from the earlier conceptual pieces. The sustained focus on narrative didn't quite pay off, and despite a downer ending I didn't particularly feel the tang of tragedy that I'd anticipated.
Nitpicking? Perhaps. It's difficult for me to criticise performers this skilled - they left me thoroughly gobsmacked from start to finish. As promised, there's something for everyone here, though for me it's the boldly experimental modernist thrills of Cristaux that will stay with me the longest.
After very much enjoying the rehearsal I was eager how the sketch I'd seen would translate to a full picture. Divided into three separate pieces, two short/one long, the show is constructed on the basis of 'something for everyone'. Indeed, each segment was markedly different from the others, offering a mixture of populist theatre and the avant-garde.
First up was Arthur Pita's Cristaux. I'd thought that Ballet Black would ease us in with something warm and personable, but Cristaux quickly proves anything but. Soundtracked by the jangling glockenspiel loops of Steve Reich's Drumming Part III, this is a coolly minimalist, almost mechanically precise demonstration of what the company is capable of.
Dancer Cira Robinson emerges in a crystal festooned tutu and tiara, the spotlight casting rays of light from it that gently discoball their way across the awed audience. It's an impressively attention grabbing introduction, only equalled by the moment when a gigantic crystal pendulum dramatically whooshes across the stage, apparently threatening to decapitate the dancers below. Robinson eventually intertwines with Mthuthuzeli November, the two mesmerisingly falling in and out of synchronisation - their motions occasionally giving the illusion that the two somehow physically meld.
As it ends it feels as if the audience collectively exhales - there's a general sense of "wow". Christopher Marney's To Begin, Begin has big shoes to fill. This is anchored by two elements, a large sheet of cobalt silk that weightlessly flutters around the stage and the magnetic stage presence of Sayaka Ichikawa. The two work through a series of eye-catching configurations; ranging from a costume to bondage to scenery. Contrasting the loose chaos of the silk with the precision of the dancers is effective, but lacks some of the oomph of the preceding piece.
After the internal is the main course: Christopher Hampson's Storyville. It tells the story of Nola (Cira Robinson) a young girl lost in New Orleans. She's a talented and natural dancer, but falls under the sway of salubrious nightclub owners Lulu and Mack. Gradually she sinks into a life of vice, the only ray of light in her life the love of an honest sailor.
Using a variety of Kurt Weill songs, there's a Cabaret-esque seedy tinge throughout, with Nola's plunge into the metaphorical (and later literal) underworld ably conveyed by smart choreography and a carefully chosen group of symbolic props. Highlights are when Nola's childhood doll is used to puppeteer her, voodoo style. As it's dropped Robinson perfectly and dramatically collapses onto the stage. Also impressive is a later scene of drunken hedonism, in which we see the interesting juxtaposition of drunken clumsiness and ballet, the dancers obviously relishing the challenge.
That said, though Storyville is an excellent showcase for the company and oozes style, I didn't feel half the emotional heft that I felt from the earlier conceptual pieces. The sustained focus on narrative didn't quite pay off, and despite a downer ending I didn't particularly feel the tang of tragedy that I'd anticipated.
Nitpicking? Perhaps. It's difficult for me to criticise performers this skilled - they left me thoroughly gobsmacked from start to finish. As promised, there's something for everyone here, though for me it's the boldly experimental modernist thrills of Cristaux that will stay with me the longest.
★★★★
Ballet Black's Triple Bill is on tour throughout 2016. Tickets and info here.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Thursday, March 5, 2015
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Ten minutes into Romeo and Juliet the music stopped, the dancers disappeared and a contrite looking man walked on stage. He explained that the performance would be restarted as the projections weren't working. After a short wait they were fixed and we tried again. This time each character was introduced with a large projection of their character's name behind them. What I found fascinating was that even without the projections it was plainly obvious who was who purely through body language and staging.
The stomping, muscled bad-boy? Well that's Tybalt. The robed man with the Shaolin dance style? Friar Lawrence. The leaping, graceful and vivacious teenage girl? No prizes for figuring that one out. That the show was this communicative so quickly bodes well, especially given my slight misgivings about ballet.
Despite enjoying the ballet movie subgenre (both Red Shoes and Black Swan are faves), my sole direct experience a sceptical 13 year old me being dragged to Swan Lake. After an hour of flouncy, tutu clad leaping I was bored to tears. But perhaps now, with a bit of cultural experience under my belt (and a smidge more patience) this ballet might just be the one for me.
Then again, maybe if 13 year old me had been taken to a ballet that featured the music of Jay Z, Katy Perry, LMFAO, My Chemical Romance and Lady Gaga I might have perked up a bit. This production, by BAD BOYS OF DANCE, directed by Rasta Thomas and choreographed by Adrienne Canterna, sticks a mischievous middle finger in the face of snootily tuxedoed 'high' culture - popping Prokofiev on the same cultural shelf as Party Rock Anthem.
Given that Romeo and Juliet is the story of two rebellious teenagers thumbing their noses at an ossified society and getting mad rutty, the obnoxiously punk attitude fits the material to a tee. The show is fuelled by the idea of kicking back against authority, which it does through gravity-defying somersaults and backflips, hip-hop influences in the dancing and the (slightly Baz Luhrmann influenced) fashions, which run the gamut from Gaga-ish art couture to Latin street gangs.
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Watching a narrative told through contemporary dance, even one as familiar as Romeo and Juliet, requires the audience to up their observational skills. Every facial expression, kick, bounce and gesticulation adds up to complex visual vocabulary. Whether you could watch this production while entirely ignorant of the story and pick up what's going on is iffy (they summarise the entire plot in the programme), but snatches of Shakespeare's dialogue spring to mind unbidden throughout, communicated purely through motion. Mercutio's strangled "A plague o' both your houses!" comes through as clear as day, as does Romeo's hushed "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?".
Smooth as the dancing is, the slightly clunky pacing distracts. Rather than present a continuous narrative, the show is broken into 24 separate sequences, between which the stage is cleared and we dutifully applaud. If I were being charitable I'd suggest that this is to emulate the atmosphere of a pop concert, but realistically it's because these disparate songs don't quite fit together. While enjoyable as is, I can't help but feel this might have become stratospherically wonderful if they'd manage to mash each song into the next, 2 Many DJs style.
As such, the experience is less that we're watching Romeo and Juliet and more that we're watching a Romeo and Juliet themed pop show. There's a decent argument that this makes it a bit plasticky - but then ephemeral, uncynical pop trifles are very much my bag. Anyway, regardless of all other concerns, seeing a daydreaming Juliet ecstatically dancing to Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, or their wedding soundtracked to Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory (complete with a hippie dance sextet), light up the pleasure centres of my brain like few other things I've seen on stage.
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Even if you're not into the whole pop thing, you can't help but appreciate the sheer skill of the dancers involved. I couldn't rip my gaze from Adrienne Canterna's Juliet. With a shock of glossy platinum hair she looked oddly ephemeral, as if her skin was made of glass. That apparent fragility makes each one of these leaps, tosses and flips that much more impressive - as if she'd shatter into a thousand pieces if she fell. At the other end the scale is Ryan Carlson's mean-as-all-hell Tybalt, whose muscular gymnastics infuse every motion into aggressive.
I walked out of this show with a big smile on my face, swept up in the sheer performance energy throughout and the simple ballisness of squeezing Shakespeare and ballet into the same space as Bruno Mars and My Chemical Romance. On further reflection there's something intangibly missing: fragments of emotion that vanish into the narrative gaps. It all adds up to a hollow experience. But still, it's a hell of a fun hollow experience.
★★★
Romeo and Juliet is at the Peacock Theatre until 29th March. Tickets here.
Given that Romeo and Juliet is the story of two rebellious teenagers thumbing their noses at an ossified society and getting mad rutty, the obnoxiously punk attitude fits the material to a tee. The show is fuelled by the idea of kicking back against authority, which it does through gravity-defying somersaults and backflips, hip-hop influences in the dancing and the (slightly Baz Luhrmann influenced) fashions, which run the gamut from Gaga-ish art couture to Latin street gangs.
Watching a narrative told through contemporary dance, even one as familiar as Romeo and Juliet, requires the audience to up their observational skills. Every facial expression, kick, bounce and gesticulation adds up to complex visual vocabulary. Whether you could watch this production while entirely ignorant of the story and pick up what's going on is iffy (they summarise the entire plot in the programme), but snatches of Shakespeare's dialogue spring to mind unbidden throughout, communicated purely through motion. Mercutio's strangled "A plague o' both your houses!" comes through as clear as day, as does Romeo's hushed "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?".
Smooth as the dancing is, the slightly clunky pacing distracts. Rather than present a continuous narrative, the show is broken into 24 separate sequences, between which the stage is cleared and we dutifully applaud. If I were being charitable I'd suggest that this is to emulate the atmosphere of a pop concert, but realistically it's because these disparate songs don't quite fit together. While enjoyable as is, I can't help but feel this might have become stratospherically wonderful if they'd manage to mash each song into the next, 2 Many DJs style.
As such, the experience is less that we're watching Romeo and Juliet and more that we're watching a Romeo and Juliet themed pop show. There's a decent argument that this makes it a bit plasticky - but then ephemeral, uncynical pop trifles are very much my bag. Anyway, regardless of all other concerns, seeing a daydreaming Juliet ecstatically dancing to Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, or their wedding soundtracked to Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory (complete with a hippie dance sextet), light up the pleasure centres of my brain like few other things I've seen on stage.
Even if you're not into the whole pop thing, you can't help but appreciate the sheer skill of the dancers involved. I couldn't rip my gaze from Adrienne Canterna's Juliet. With a shock of glossy platinum hair she looked oddly ephemeral, as if her skin was made of glass. That apparent fragility makes each one of these leaps, tosses and flips that much more impressive - as if she'd shatter into a thousand pieces if she fell. At the other end the scale is Ryan Carlson's mean-as-all-hell Tybalt, whose muscular gymnastics infuse every motion into aggressive.
I walked out of this show with a big smile on my face, swept up in the sheer performance energy throughout and the simple ballisness of squeezing Shakespeare and ballet into the same space as Bruno Mars and My Chemical Romance. On further reflection there's something intangibly missing: fragments of emotion that vanish into the narrative gaps. It all adds up to a hollow experience. But still, it's a hell of a fun hollow experience.
★★★
Romeo and Juliet is at the Peacock Theatre until 29th March. Tickets here.
Monday, December 22, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
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Last night the druids gathered at Stonehenge for the winter Solstice: Alban Arthur. On the freezing Wiltshire fields, clad in velvet capes, antler headdresses, brass torcs and flint-topped staffs they celebrated the return of the 'Divine Child', the rebirth of the Sun. Meanwhile in Shoreditch I was at my very own bacchanalia, but the Divine we worship is far less spiritual and far more trashy.
This is Dreams from the Darkness: a relatively low-key gathering of beautiful freaks, sadistic psychopaths and sexual predators. Taking place in Through the Looking Glass we occupy their back room. Though the 'secret bar' is a little old-hat by now, there's still a thrill in peeling back some item of furniture to reveal a 'hidden' place; be they inside fridges, through wardrobes or in this case, concealed by a gigantic mirror.
Hosted by Rubyyy Jones (last seen at Mimetic's Young Feminist Whores), the night features four performers. First up was drag queen Ragina LeLumpi, whose heels and bouffant wig left her not just towering over the audience, but threatening the lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. The first performance was good, but it was in the second that she really shined. In Snow Queen regalia, soundtracked by Bjork's Pagan Poetry, Frosti and Kate Bush's December Will Be Magic Again, the act became 'A Very Shoreditch Solistice', especially when she sprinkled fake snow over the audience.
Towards the back of room, two burly Men's Health-lookin' bartenders regarded all this with suspicion. You get the feeling that a) this cabaret crowd isn't the type to glug down £10 cocktails and b) they're used to a swankier corporate clientèle than this misfit flotsam and jetsam that's rocked up on their shore tonight. They perhaps hit their tolerance ceiling with Rubyyyy Jones' song about shoes. Preceded by a long dialogue extract from John Waters' Female Trouble, the performance ends up with incoherent naked yelling and the aggressive hurling of heels at the bar, behind which stood the two increasingly unimpressed looking bartenders.
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| Desmond O'Connor |
After the interval we were informed that we'd come this close to being unceremoniously ejected from the venue. It would have made for a good story, but given what was to come I'm glad it didn't happen. Then again, the night was to head even closer to the bone with the appearance of Blair the Bipolar Bear aka Desmond O'Connor. After a jaunty song about finding one's calling as a "cracker joke packer at a cracker packing factory" he segued into a song about a child being raped on Christmas Eve.
Ah, nothin' guaranteed to get an audience feeling festive like the musical tale of a kid being bummed up the arse by Father Christmas. As he sang "God rest ye mental men" and "violent night / unholy night" while tossing a suspiciously lubed carrot into the story, you wonder for a moment if this is really what you want to see just before you decamp to relative's houses for babies, mulled wine and mince pies.
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| Constance Peach |
Similar Christmas perversions were to come with the entrance of Constance Peach. Dressed in a little girl nightie and to the tune of Cloudbusting (Kate Bush has certainly had a popular year in burlesque) she constructs a voodoo doll Santa from a pillow and a pound shop costume. Dancing around with it she eventually plucks a man from the audience and treats him to a Christmas themed lapdance. Gold corsets are ripped off, pasties are exposed, tits are jigged; it's all a damn good time. I've seen a hell of a lot of burlesque acts; and let's face it, a lot of them are pretty crappy. Now there's not much that's mindboggling new in Peach's act, but dammit, she does what she does well.
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| Tatiana Diavoletto |
As good as that was, the toppermost of the poppermost here was undoubtedly Tatiana Diavoletto, who radiates the easy confidence of someone who knows they're the most graceful person in the room. Within a lineup of sexual chaos and sly innuendo, her dancing has an artistic purity that sets her apart from the rest.. It's all too easy for a performer to shock by flashing your genitals at a crowd, but it feels far more profound to shock with beauty. So to Jules Massenet's heavenly music from Manon she wowed the crowd into total submission. It's kind of a cheesy reference, but I was reminded of a quote from The Shawshank Redemption: "It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away."
Maybe I should check out some ballet sometime. I had a lovely night - all the better for the slightly low-key, chilled out and friendly atmosphere. This felt like a crowd of cabaret veterans, both on stage and in the audience, everyone on the same page and easy in each other's company. And if we're going to ring in the Solstice I'd much rather do it surrounded by drag queens, ballerinas and filthy minstrels than beardy old druids hugging chilly old rocks.
Monday, August 25, 2014
Monday, August 25, 2014
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The Killers once asked “are we human or are we dancer?” Kenneth Elvebakk's Ballet Boys answers by demonstrating that you can be one or the other – but not both. His documentary, following three Norwegian boys with hopes of being professional ballet dancers, shows the determination, skill and good luck needed to succeed in a cut-throat world that demands perfection.
Our three young Baryshnikovs are Torgier, Syvert and Lukas, all of whom range in talent and motivation. Lukas looks as if he's been genetically bred for dance success, all boy band blue eyes and confident grace. He's Terminator-like in his determination to make it as a ballet dancer, and skilled to the point that he outshines everyone in the film. His superhuman skill is impressive, but makes him a bit unrelatable - the heart of the film lies with Syvert and Torgeir (but mainly Syvert).
In an early scene Syvert bemoans his East Asian ethnicity, explaining that he wishes he was white Norwegian. Right away we recognise that he's nursing an inferiority complex next to the easy-going Torgier and dance commando Lukas. There's a meaty psychological paradox at play in a boy who considers himself innately 'out of place' trying to climb the peaks of physical and mental perfection: transforming his body into a direct tool for artistic expression.
Torgeir is a different kettle of fish, though what kind of fish is anyone's guess. He's the Collins to Lukas and Syvert's Armstrong and Aldrin. Mainly he's an amiable sort of guy, floating around in the background of scenes cracking jokes and stretching. Though we peer into Syvert and Lukas' home lives, Torgeir remains an unknown quantity, a victim, I suspect, of brief run time.
At a mere 72 minutes Elvebakk's film mirrors the bodies of its subjects; lean, pacey and with zero percent fat. On one hand I appreciate brevity in cinema, optimistically treating it as a sign of a confident, concise director. On the other how much justice can a documentary do to his subjects and the art of ballet in such a short amount of time?
Unfortunately this is more the latter than the former. Ballet Boys bears more than a passing resemblance to Steve James' 1994 classic Hoop Dreams. Both follow boys with big ambitions; one set to become professional ballet dancers, the other to compete in the NBA. Both show the emotional and physical toll it takes on the subjects, exacerbated by the weight of ambition and the knowledge that only a tiny minority ever make it. Hoop Dreams follows just two boys, is nearly three hours long and is about as comprehensive a study you could feasibly get of its subject. By comparison Ballet Boys barely skims the surface.
Another flaw is that other than the knowledge that they want to turn professional, Elvebakk never lays out the milestones they need to achieve to do it. We jump haphazardly from auditions to audition with little idea of the stakes. Late in the film we learn, almost as a postscript, that Lukas triumphed over nearly 1200 other applicants to get a place in a top ballet school, a fact that would have immeasurably upped the tension of the preceding scenes.
Also absent is any explanation of why they started dancing in the first place. We meet them in the middle of their training and while some attention is paid to why they want to continue, we've got no idea how they began. Ballet Boys recognises that being a teenage male ballet enthusiast is somewhat peculiar, so knowing what initially attracted these very different boys to this world would add a splodge of character to proceedings.
But the worst consequence of the short run time is that we don't get to see the boys properly dance. Sure, we get a few jauntily edited clips of them doing the odd move to a dubstep beat (presumably intended to show that ballet's hip, cool and with it yeah?) and a few seconds here and there from various contests, but I was craving a couple of unbroken minutes of footage demonstrating what each of these boys can do.
Presumably the potential audience for a ballet documentary must, at minimum, enjoy watching people dance, so why the need to chop up their moves into MTV inflected quick cuts? This robs us of that Billy Elliot moment when we finally understand why they're pushing themselves so hard in pursuit of a distant aesthetic goal.
It's a pity because there's a lot of potential in these boy's stories. I found myself craving more and more information as the film went on; what were their parent's reactions to their child deciding to go pro-dancer? What do their non-ballet friends think of the whole affair? What, exactly do they want to achieve if they do make it? All of this goes answered. What's left is anorexic, as if Elvebakk doesn't think this subject and these boys are going to hold our attention.
The film has its moments – nearly all of them arising from the casual camaraderie between these three remarkable young men. We sense the bond forged between them and they succeed in making us care about their success: we want to see them achieve their dreams. To the film's credit it does go some way to outlining the downsides to ballet; a destroyed body and retirement by the age of 40; the sacrifice of a 'normal' social life in favour of intensive training; the simple risk of a random career ending injury.
These moments of illumination raise Ballet Boys from the humdrum, but it's just too slight to give us any real insight into the weird, high-stakes world of ballet.
★★
Ballet Boys is released September 12th.
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