Leeds-based Northern Ballet has built a reputation as a source of fine dancers who are also impressive actors. Federico Bonelli, the former Royal Ballet principal who took over its directorship in 2022, is proving a worthy steward of this tradition.
The company’s latest visit to London is a triple bill of “shorts’, one almost 50 years old, the other two commissioned by Bonelli. Together they make an extremely satisfying menu.
Opening the bill, Rudi Van Dantzig’s 1977 Four Last Songs, to Richard Strauss’s music, is a piece in the same vein as Macmillan’s Song of the Earth, with the same melancholy undertow as its characters move towards an acceptance of separation by death. On a simple backdrop a landscape is painted with billowing clouds overhead that alter colour as the songs’ moods change, from brooding purple to ruddy gold and dark pink, ending with a predictable fiery orange for “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset).
Shepherded by an Angel in brown (Bruno Serraclara), four couples in muted pastels the colour of autumnal leaves enter silently and perform, one by one, emotionally charged duets to the songs, each full of fluid lifts and swooning falls that follow the lines of the score. In each duet, the two dancers visibly yearn to stay together but must ultimately submit to the Angel’s decrees.
The first couple, Saeka Shirai and Harris Beattie, in green costumes echoing the song’s title, “Spring”, float and whirl almost weightlessly, like two giddy skaters. They perform one of several lovely lifts where the woman lies horizontally draped across her partner’s shoulders. For “September”, the second pair, Dominique LaRose and George Liang, are graver but equally passionate; and the bond between the couple dancing to the third song, “At Bedtime”, Jonathan Hanks and Sarah Chun (pictured below right), seems so strong that they appear to be dancing together while 10 feet apart.
For the final section, Amber Lewis and Jackson Dwyer verge on desperation, she clawing at an invisible wall. But the moves resolve into a docile line as the couples lean on each other grouped around the Angel, having attained some form of peace. Add the sublime sounds of Gundula Janowitz’s unearthly soaring soprano, and this is an overwhelming work that deserves to be in many repertoires. The cast dance it with both precision and abandon.
Chun and Beattie (pictured bottom) appeared in Fools on opening night, the third item on the bill, as a pair of star cross’d lovers in a township. They are sensational in this, frisky, besotted young lovers who try to bridge the tribal division between them. He is a Thembu, she a Hlubi. Their love story plays out against washing lines and shacks of corrugated iron, in a community where men gather around a brazier at night, taking to violence when their faction is threatened.
Based on the novel Hill of Fools, the piece was created by the multi-tasking Mthuthuzeli November, who provided the choreography, and also contributed to the music and set design. It is a familiar story, but he brings to it a thrilling energy and exuberance, especially in the fight scenes, where the whole company is onstage squared up against each other. Women threaten other women with large broom heads; the men resort to sticks. Chun’s brother (Antoni Cañellas Artigues), an over-zealous defender of her virtue, dances like an angry beast, pawing the ground with his feet and leaping like an enraged hyena (though he seems to be too late as she pats her stomach several times, hinting she is pregnant).
Like his score, which mixes European and African instrumentation, November’s steps are a clever mashup of classical moves and popular styles.The dancers jitterbug one minute, launch into jetés the next.
All the while, percussive rhythms, chanting and ululating drive them on. They beat their chests, stamp their feet, skip on the spot with hands on their raised knees. In a quieter moment Chun and Beattie kiss and, as a reaction, her leg extends nto a perfect arabesque, like a blossoming flower. Beattie gets a lovely sequence of steps where he gently teases and tickles Chun, yet his body is all rounded, fluid shapes. The ending is predictably sad, her grief palpable.
To leaven these two hefty works, between them Bonelli has added a cheeky little piece by the Royal Ballet’s Kristen McNally, Victory Dance. To jazzy Latin-inflected music by the Mercury Prize-winning Ezra Collective, three dancers go through moves designed to give pride of place to the one in a wheelchair, guest artist Joseph Powell-Main, a former Royal Ballet School pupil.
Peppy Yu Wakizuka and Archie Sherman lift him out of his chair, use him to partner them and match his moves. He demonstrates that sitting down to dance is no barrier when you can roll your athletic shoulders, expressively move your arms and face, twirl your chair and, especially, go flying across the stage and dramatically pull out into an abrupt turn. It’s surprisingly sexy and exhilarating, a serious victory for dance.
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