Crystal Pite tore the house down: Royal Ballet’s 21st-Century Choreographers reviewed

The choreographers called on to get the nation’s dancers back on to the stage have as much to say about the state of our times as they do about art.

Many of the works were created during the pandemic. English National Ballet’s Reunion started life as a series of dance films that were streamed last winter; with the opening of theatres, ENB’s artistic director Tamara Rojo asked the choreographers to adapt them for live staging. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Laid in Earth was the most moving; a portrait of man coming to terms with impending death, whether his own or his lover’s. To a live performance of ‘Dido’s Lament’, four dancers — at times two couples and at times an individual with his/her shadow — tangle and detangle themselves from each other, coil, prop up, before falling away. One is a figure in black, reptilian-like in his writhing and twisting on the floor.