Black magic

Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young man remembers his terrible encounter with a supernatural ‘fairy’s child’. Beguiled to sleep with this ravishing fantasy creature, he dreams of a ghostly corps of other chaps similarly beguiled, who warn him that she was a witch who would leave him forever haunted, sick and bereft.

You can remodel this fantasy this way and that, switch the genders, reconfigure death, sleep and hallucination, and come up with Giselle, La Sylphide, Swan Lake, La Bayadère in the 19th century, and then find Fokine, Balanchine and Ashton developing it into the 20th in Les Sylphides, Symphony in C and Ondine. Then the ballet world wakes up to emotional realism and superrational digitalism, attended by kulcha-media denunciation of classical ballet conventions as sexist, racist and old-fashioned.

So nothing could have more in-yer-face impact than the resurrection of la belle dame by the hip Arthur Pita in his brilliant little pas de deux, Cristaux, for Ballet Black.