THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Carlos Acosta’s move to be Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet was much heralded and then Covid hit, throwing his and everyone else’s plans into disarray. Thankfully, with that behind us, Sadler’s Wells was able to welcome back BRB to where, of course, they all started - they used to be the Sadler’s Wells Ballet company.
The programme comprised two works premiered in Birmingham in June and a company premiere of a piece with a bonus pas de deux, specially added for Acosta and prima ballerina Alessandra Ferri (ex-Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre).
City of a Thousand Trades explores themes of migration and what you trade to build a new life. It’s a love letter to Birmingham’s heavy industrial heritage, the city having seen skilled workers flock to it to work in the silk and metal industries.
This piece, by Havana-born choreographer and ex-Rambert star Miguel Altunaga, is the weakest of the three, however. Gloomily lit and designed, the dancers manoeuvre themselves alongside various sized boxes and steel poles all to the clang of percussionists.
Mathias Coppens' score makes heavy use of percussion and electric guitars to echo the metal trades, and drums to signify the diversity of the place, but gladly doesn’t blow your ear drums like Hofesh Shechter. It manages to be unexpectedly lyrical despite the brief and the piece only really comes alive in the pas de deux where the dancers are allowed to take flight. Madeleine Kludje, the dramaturg from Birmingham Rep, was brought in to lend it some narrative heft but in doing so she has invested it with a literalism which unbalances it. A voiceover poem from Birmingham Poet Laureate, Casey Bailey, rams home the theme as do some mournful oral histories by immigrants on the loneliness of displacement. These all feel rather laboured and redundant when it’s the movement itself that should be doing the talking.
The second piece, Imminent, is a spritely and exuberant piece for 16 dancers with echoes of Balanchine’s classicism. Paul Englishby’s score is a delight but often not matched by London-based Brazilian choreographer Daniela Cardim’s steps. The piece is informed by themes of burning rainforests and climate emergency and how we’re heading for a tipping point, but it would be hard to guess this without doing your homework. The large iceberg set finally cracks to reveal a fiery interior but is this a door to something? Does it signal some fresh hope or opportunity? Our current state may be grim, but this isn’t, it is packed with sprinting runs and whirling turns as it luxuriates in the sheer delight of movement.
The highlight of the evening is Chacona by Spanish choreographer Goyo Montero (ex-Nuremberg Ballet and Acosta Danza). It’s a powerful ensemble piece using the full company. Set to set some exquisite Bach music, here played live, in turn, by a solo piano, violin and classical guitar. The additional pas de deux provides an opportunity to bask in the sheer charisma of the two great mature stars, Acosta and Ferri, who have lost none of their sparkle.
The company, looking fearlessly chic in their sleek black costumes, appear on chequerboard squares of light and shadow on a stage which is lit with unerring complexity and surgical precision by Nicolás Fischtel and Montero himself. It manages to be both austere and hot in the way that only Nederlands Dans Theater can usually manage and indeed it has many echoes of their global contemporary ballet style. The formations are drilled, and the duos are polished, and you can’t take your eyes of them.
Acosta is really stretching his new company here with the latest ideas and new styles and while they all may not have got there yet; it promises some exciting times ahead. The company is regularly touring and is one to watch.
