If there’s one thing scarcer than hen’s teeth in serious choreography nowadays, it’s a light heart. When was the last time we had something jolly created in the artform that brought us La Fille mal gardée, Coppélia and Les biches?
Still, the first week of the start of the dance year was all good stuff, if sombre (and Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are over from New York at the Peacock right now, thank heavens). English National Ballet’s Lest We Forget bill of new ballets was made last year for the start of the first world war centenary, but deserved repeating as a demonstration of serious ballets by accomplished choreographers.
War ballets tread a fine line between pacifist drool and emotional catharsis. The latter sometimes arrives with the assistance of the music (Kenneth MacMillan’s Gloria), the shock of representation (Rosie Kay’s 5 Soldiers), or the atavistic understanding of group dynamics (Crystal Pite’s Polaris with Thomas Adès, which just felt like one of the great war ballets even if not billed as one).
Liam Scarlett tackles wartime imagery most literally and most sentimentally. His munitions-factory women, with their gunpowder-white hands, cling to the backs of their departing men in a clever emulation of a knapsack, but the angel imagery is soft-centred, urged on by the muddy sobs of the Liszt adapted score. While it’s brave of Scarlett to choreograph in slo-mo, nothing remarkable surfaces from the sepia.
Russell Maliphant is not an overtly emotional type, and in Second Breath his waves of young men eddy and flow like the night-time sea, thrown up haplessly by their group sweepings to catch the light overhead, as if floating for a moment, before crashing down into the dark. The potency of this fluid repetition is due to its emulsion with Michael Hulls’s mesmerisingly ethereal lighting, but the overall impact would be much greater in silence.
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