|
|
|
|
|
Céline Gittens and Yasiel Hodelín Bello in Wubkje Kuindersma’s final scene, Luna. Pictures: Katja Ogrin Luna Birmingham Royal Ballet Birmingham Hippodrome **** The final part of Carlos Acosta’s Birmingham trilogy is perhaps the most ambitious, a full length ballet on a theme based on a celebration of the women who helped build the city that has been home to Birmingham Royal Ballet since 1990. The inspiration was Louise Palfreyman Once Upon a Time in Birmingham: Women Who Dare to Dream, but this is no biog ballet of women of note, but a collection of scenes expressing the hopes and dreams of not just women but humanity – with a darker side in one section with a lone dancer fighting against female oppression. To add to the theme the production itself is an all female, multi-national affair which includes choreographers Iratxe Ansa (Spain); Wubkje Kuindersma (Netherlands); Seeta Patel (UK); Arielle Smith (UK); and Thaís Suárez (Cuba). There is music composed or arranged by Kate Whitley (UK) while Costume Design is by London based Imaan Ashraf, Projection Design is by Hayley Egan and Lighting Design is down to Emma Jones. What makes that remarkable is not that they are all women, but the simple fact that no one would have batted an eyelid or even thought it was worthy of a mention if they had all been men. Whatever the make-up of the team the result is a fascinating mix which never seems to quite embrace the hand of contemporary dance nor sport the colours of traditional classical ballet, so we are left with elements of both to enjoy in an amalgam of genres, something for everyone, creating a wonderful kaleidoscope of emotions. We open with Terra choreographed by Wubkje Kuindersma, with a choir of 32 children, a soprano and baritone all on an empty stage with the Hippodrome’s vast rear wall a video screen portraying the moon and a sea shimmering in its light. The theme here is the same moon being seen by everyone and the need to educate and help future generations protect the world we live in.
Terra choreographed by Wubkje Kuindersma I must admit I didn’t see that, but that’s far from a criticism. Art only works if it creates emotion, makes you feel something, even if it is different to the intention of the creator, and the eight dancers played their part in setting a scene we might all see differently. Come Scene 2, Learning to Dream Big from Seeta Patel, and it was hard to miss the message, Education is the key to enlightenment with five dancers, school girls going to bed and drifting into a world of books, wonderful LED affairs with opening glowing fans of pages, which sees our students acting out roles such as a doctor, or a teacher or with a touch of Beethoven’s fifth, a conductor. The world is waiting for those who dream. The video, incidentally, is an animation of drawings from local school children, and, as a contemporary touch, we even got a rainbow NHS flag. For all the NHS’s faults many who will see Luna, I suspect, me included, would not have been there without it. That is followed by Unwavering from Cuba’s Thaís Suárez and a wonderful, at times sad, at times soaring pas de deux from Beatrice Parma and Javier Rojas set to Gabriel Fauré’s moving Requiem Op 48 arranged by Kate Whitley with haunting words in Latin and Greek from opera singers Armenian soprano Matianna Hovanisyan and Zambian born baritone Themba Mvula, a Royal Birmingham Conservatoire alumnus. It is a dance of contrasts, of despair and, in overcoming adversity, of hope. The second act opens with Empowerment from Cuban born Arielle Smith starting with a single dancer, Rosanna Ely, with seven more joining as the music expands and swells with the eight dancers becoming a team, offering each other friendship and support with There is Silence from Our Future, In Your Hands, Whitley’s opera-oratorio with librettist Laura Attridge. Overexposed is the darkest of the six scenes of the ballet with Beatrice Parma returning in her red tunic as a sort of innocent abroad faced with eight white clad, faceless men, their heads wrapped like sinister mummies. The dance is threatening, Parma a victim, the men in control able to lift her, carry her, control her making it at times an uncomfortable watch, a menacing pas de neuf. Once again though, the dance is about hope rather than despair as the men become human and the red clad figure finally overcomes the threat all leading to the final scene, the emponymous Luna from Kuindersma, again. It is the finale which brings all the elements together with the entire cast joining to the strains of the children’s choir, soprano and baritone singing I am I say with music by Whitley and words by British-Egyptian writer Sabrina Mahfouz with once more the moon shining down.
Beatrice Palma and the mummies in the sinister Overexposed Whitley’s music is symphonic at times, lyrical and engaging, her choice of pieces to adapt working well and they are all played beautifully, as we have come to expect, by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia under music director Paul Murphy, with, in keeping with the theme, celebrated violinist Joana Valentinavicute as leader. She is normallyco-leader with Robin Gibbs in the first chair. When Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet arrived in Birmingham as BRB back in 1990, the then artistic director Peter Wright gave the city his new and now internationally celebrated version of The Nutcracker as a thank you gift to the city, so Carlos Acosta, the new director is carrying on the tradition with his trilogy, his gift to the city. City of a Thousand Trades in 2021 was followed by the most daring of the three, Black Sabbath – The Ballet, celebrating Birmingham’s heavy metal pioneers. In Luna we have a return to a more conventional form with its delightful melding of tradition and modernity, classical and contemporary before an ever changing video wall with setting and rising suns, moons, crumpled paper, a vortex and children’s drawings as background. Luna may have set out originally to celebrate the women of Birmingham, it morphed into a clarion call to women in general, but perhaps ended with a vague theme and a disparate collection of stories in dance, hardly surprising with different choreographers with differing ideas working independently. The result is almost like a double helping of BRB's Triple Bill. Each piece can stand alone or be changed in the order, which a purest may question as to whether that constitutes a complete ballet. Whatever the view though, at its heart Luna is a wonderful celebration of dance with six scenes each telling its own story quite beautifully. To 5 Oct and then at Saddler’s Wells 22-23 Oct. Roger Clarke 03-10-24 |
|
|
|
.jpeg)
.jpeg)