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Youngsters dance up a storm
Tree spirit: Japanese dancer Diasuke Miura from Tokyo is wonderfully pliant as Caliban The Tempest Ballet Cymru The Roses Theatre, Tewkesbury BALLET Cymru,
or Ballet Wales, is a vital company of accomplished young dancers,
based in Newport, Gwent. They tour to not just Their present
productions of Shakespeare's The
Tempest, to rarely-heard music by the
Finnish composer Sibelius, and two stories by Roald Dahl (Little
Red Riding Hood and
The Three Little Pigs)
using brilliantly pastiched music by
Paul Patterson, take them far afield: from Sadler's Wells to
Stourbridge (1 Dec),
Lincs to
Lancs, Hexham (Northumberland) to
Ilfracombe in Devon. They excel in small and medium venues; but can
also excel on a large stage. Hinging on just ten or so dancers and a
dedicated small support team, this is a company that has already stormed
the heights. The vast amount of preparation is obvious from their
stagings; and it has constantly to reinvent its team. Nursed and nurtured by their choreographer and
the company's founder, the Royal Ballet School-trained (and Northern
Ballet veteran) Darius James, these youthful performers, aged, roughly,
18 to 25, deliver a quality of dance that is unquestionably of national
standards. They can mime and they can act. They have mastered
traditional ballet: a good deal is danced on point. But the productions
diverge from the stuffy, predictable or hackneyed. The dance is mature,
elegant, sophisticated, refreshing; and dazzlingly alive. A few minutes
with Ballet Cymru lifts the spirits.
Their danced productions of Romeo and Juliet,
A Midsummer Night's Dream, even a splendidly crafted Hamlet,
have brought the company to a high pitch. Under Milk Wood was a
peak. Their Romeo was astounding: beautifully shaped and crafted. We get the storm scene – and what an outburst,
with the (here, Finnish) elements raging and dancers drowning behind
cloudy gauze. James blocks his team beautifully – whether here, or in
the Caliban-Stephano-Trinculo scenes, or in the opening stages of his
Red Riding Hood and Little Pigs exposés.
As with the Dahl double bill, where Bishop is a
superb narrator, he dances less than he might: in the air, he looks like
the (all too curtailed) final scene of Billy Elliot. He has
grace, poise, dignity and charm: the last he successfully quashes in
characterisng Prospero, who can famously verge on a curmudgeon; but his
delight at the designed coming-together of Ferdinand and the delectable,
parasol-wielding Miranda is patent not just from his face, but from his
body language. Bishop strikes me as a performer of considerable
versatility, a snip for any company. And that will grow and blossom
further. The joy of this production was newcomer Lydia Arnoux, an Elmhurst School of Dance graduate who has already made appearances for Birmingham Royal Ballet. Her Ariel was like watching the very antithesis of Simon Russell Beale's moody RSC sprite, podgily pitted against Alec McCowen's Prospero. Arnoux has the most scintillating gestures: not just arms and fingers, but (to wonderful effect) her neck is brought into play. Like the sensational (boy) Puck in Ballet Cymru's
Dream (soon to be revived), she has the essential range: thus
Ariel is buoyant, light as gossamer, scudding as if airborne; cocky,
subdued, and (before his long-delayed release) humbled, hangdog; he can
be controlling, omnipresent, virulent; tender, delicate, somniferous;
all the more impressive, as Arnoux is actually marginally chunky. That is part of the charm. The only weakness,
possibly, was a tendency to recycle certain gestures, like a kind of
ritual. Yet that is perhaps the whole point. She is a magical performer
already (worth catching, too, as Dahl's chief Little Pig). What role,
one wonders, might she assay next?
Four (or sometimes two) white sprites cavort
about, occasionally but always beefing up the action. These might
usefully be sharpened up a bit: there was a slight indeterminacy about
their role (although they are meant to be, by definition, elusive; and
their feeding off one another yielded some subtle pas-de-deux, -trois
etc.) What did work rather well was the Masque (yes, we
got even that: perhaps we owe it to Sibelius.) Three divine performers –
the usual suspects. From their colours we could sort of work out who was
who (Ceres being yellow, perhaps). The effect was beguiling without
being kitsch: a fine achievement.
Jemima Beatty, Welsh-born and multilingual, was
rather a joy as Trinculo. Armed with a lovely repertoire of slinky
movements (though likewise, one or two were overused), she brightens up
the show no end. The gabardine moment perhaps needs slight reworking, or
even more comic bizarreness in the staging. Mandev Sokhi, from Cheshire, and also Ballet
Cymru's Education Officer overseeing its outreach programme, proved his
versatility by doubling Gonzalo with Stephano, and contrasting his roles
artfully. It involved some neat quick-changes – the former attractively
attired in claret robes, Stephano cavorting in black tail coat and a
kind of comic white underwear. Gonzalo, one felt, deserved space to
prate a bit more. Parisian Nicolas Capelle's Alonso was dominant due to
his height; and he alone might have supplied an alternative Prospero.
Alonso is a thankless role, and it is to James's credit that he gave
this rather tedious royal blackguard decent things to do and dance. One unexpected twist helped this presentation
tangibly. Darius James went to town on the plotters: Antonio and
Sebastian - both played by girls, and danced quite brilliantly. Their
sinister swirls, knives in hand, as they almost embrace their intended
victims, grew into an hilarious pastiche. We always know they won't have
the nerve, and so it proved. Will we - won't we, soon - not quite yet,
maybe - perhaps not: they created a villainous yoyo, an emotional
seesaw, that was as sly and witty as it was dark and sinister. The two
girls' execution, on and off point, was unmatched: the best-honed
ensemble of the evening. Sometimes we got the text: on the backcloth we
were drawn in to Caliban's ‘This isle is full of noises' – Sibelius
starts it a bit rowdily, perhaps missing the point – with the text
unfolding before our eyes; and if not ‘Ye elves of hills', which almost
(not quite) disappeared off the map, and might have offered Bishop a
stunning solo; but Shakespeare's epilogue was scrolled in full,
and James gave his stately young Prospero an inspiring finale: a sort of
danced emotional apotheosis.' There are powers behind this throne. The
assistant choreographer, Australian-trained Amy Doughty, had a hand in
several of the more subtle and salient scenes, also coaching individual
dancers, and always coaxing. If the costumes and spooky décor were
superb, and they were, that was because Yvonne Greenleaf, Administrative
Director, is much more than that. You can see her golden touch in almost
every aspect of Ballet Cymru's activities; it is she who has made the
company such a success since its inception; she gives it heart; and
remains its inspiration. That says much for these exquisite young
dancers, and mountains for her. 18-10-12 Touring the Roderic Dunnett
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The current Tempest is a case in point. What is all the more
impressive, apart from the sheer inventiveness and sensitivity of
James's choreography, plus the finesse – and touching innocence - of the
dancing, is the amount of Shakespeare's last, or near-last, play James
has managed to preserve. 