Ballet’s super couple should stick to the classical repertoire

Last week, the feast of long-awaited dance events on offer echoed bygone days when London life was dominated by the strategically engineered appearances of rival ballet stars at the same time in different venues.

At the London Coliseum, Solo for Two featured one of ballet’s super-duper couples, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev. As Osipova told me in a recent interview, their aim was to tackle choreographic modes outside their standard repertoire. Alas, bravery and bravura do not always go together. The classically trained Mikhail Baryshnikov and, more recently, Sylvie Guillem have made successful forays into modern and postmodern dance, but they were very much the exception. Let’s not forget what happened when Nureyev tried to dance Graham.

But it was not just a miscalculated gamble. It is possible that the three dance-makers, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Ohad Naharin and Arthur Pita, struggled to address and accommodate what is known as the ‘tacit knowledge’ — that is, the individual’s baggage of artistic experiences — of the two ballet stars.