Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill demonstrating her success in expanding the repertory and raising technical standards. If only the company could tour this class of work outside London. 

The climax of the evening was a new version of The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek – his second stab at dramatising music so graphically vivid and violently aggressive that choreographers since Nijinsky have struggled to find imagery and movement to match its primal energy. Even Kenneth MacMillan and Pina Bausch didn’t quite hack it for me.

Ek has avoided the clichés: nobody stomps about plastered in scary face paint. I wonder if his scenario was inspired by Ari Aster’s elegant horror film Midsommar? A community in elegantly cut white kimonos and tunics have selected not a sacrificial virgin but a girl and a boy to mate. The girl’s parents seem anxious but fatalistic.