Expressive and eloquent: Northern Ballet’s Three Short Ballets reviewed

Ballet companies have become dismally timid about exploring their 20th-century heritage: everything nowadays must be either box-fresh new or a fairy-tale classic, which seems to me a recipe for an unbalanced diet. So I’m pleased that under the directorship of Federico Bonelli, Northern Ballet is pluckily dusting off neglected treasures of the recent past. Last year brought Hans van Manen’s exquisite Adagio Hammerklavier (1973) back to life; this year, it’s the turn of Rudi van Dantzig’s setting of Strauss’s Four Last Songs (1977), danced to the recording made by Gundula Janowitz and Herbert von Karajan.

A dark angelic figure, hungry for some grim reaping, hovers over four youthful couples in various states of amorous bliss – cavorting through the sunlit uplands, yearning for the Wagnerian infinite. Strauss’s moony and vaporous music offers little emotional variety, but van Dantzig’s lushly expressive choreography subtly builds a mood that darkens and intensifies – it’s not the bland bucolic frolic it initially seems. Was Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth an influence? Northern Ballet’s admirable dancers meet its challenges with eloquent grace, and there is a rather beautiful landscape backcloth painted by van Dantzig’s lifelong partner Toer van Schayk. More such revivals, please. This one will come south to the Linbury Theatre in January.

The programme also contains Kristen McNally’s Victory Dance, a brief jazzy blast showcasing the astounding talent of Joe Powell-Main, a disabled virtuoso exuberantly unconfined by his wheelchair or gammy leg. It’s a lot of fun. I was rather less engaged by Mthuthuzeli November’s Fools, which is little more than West Side Story translated to a South African township. Much too long, it is tritely choreographed, too reliant on spasms of aimless jiving, and predictable at every turn, from every angle. Perhaps an all-black cast could give it more authenticity, but Northern Ballet’s multi-racial complexion fatally dilutes its impact.