The death last week at the age of 83 of the sublime Lynn Seymour – muse to Ashton and MacMillan, the creator of roles in Romeo and Juliet and A Month in the Country among many others – set me thinking gloomily about the current dearth of ballerinas with her questioning intelligence and free spirit. So much technical proficiency around, so many elegant gymnasts, Dutch dolls and Sugar Plum Fairies, but so little distinctive personality or temperament. Where is the mystique, the grandeur, the ability to ambush our emotions?
Her clarity of articulation is bobby-dazzling, her energy apparently inexhaustible
Tiler Peck is among the best of the new breed. Star of New York City Ballet, she is all bubble and brilliance, a cheerleader, a can-do sort of dancer with boundless verve. Her clarity of articulation is bobby-dazzling – every twist and bend elastic yet precise, her energy apparently inexhaustible. But what you see is all there is: there’s no sense of a deeper or more complex self.
At Sadler’s Wells, she fronted a turbo-charged programme including William Forsythe’s The Barre Project, a fast and witty riff on the rehearsal studio first seen online during the pandemic, and Time Spell, a parade involving improvised tap sequences that went on too long. But the first two brief items were super: Thousandth Orange, lucid, crisp and firmly structured, suggests that Peck has talent as a choreographer too, followed by Swift Arrow, a sparky duet by Alonzo King for Peck and the hunky Roman Mejia with the kick of a dry martini. Now I’m feeling a bit guilty about my strictures, because how many give out as generously as Peck does?
Twenty years ago, there was a crying need for Ballet Black, a company dedicated to nurturing dancers from ethnic minorities.
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