Irresistible: Osipova/Linbury reviewed

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One of the few indisputably great ballerinas of her generation, Natalia Osipova is a magnificent exemplar of the Russian school, her training at the Bolshoi furnishing her with a steely security of technique, powerful stage personality, and spirit of dauntless daring. Happily based at the Royal Ballet since 2013, she’s now also one of ours. As popular inside the company as she is with audiences, and much missed while she recuperated from an ankle operation last summer, she returned as the focus of a ‘curated’ evening in the intimate environment of the Linbury Theatre.

First came a revival of a modernist classic: Martha Graham’s Errand into the Maze dates from 1947, with exiguous designs by Isamu Noguchi and an acerbic score by Gian Carlo Menotti. A reimagining of Ariadne’s encounter with the Minotaur, heavy on vaginal and phallic symbolism, it retains its austere archetypal clarity and still communicates powerfully. The economy of its means provides an object lesson to today’s youngsters reliant on catwalk costumes and digitally contrived gimmicks: everything salient is expressed through movement.

More muscular and sturdily built than most of her profession, Osipova can dig deep into Graham’s characteristic struggle against gravitational force and rejection of anything daintily or airily graceful. No tremulous ballet virgin but a determined woman with agency, resourceful and dangerous, she sculpts every gesture with expressive force. Marcelino Sambé is equally electrifying as her doomed prey, brute manhood outsmarted by female guile.

A film of Osipova dancing Frederick Ashton’s masterly Five Brahms Waltzes in the manner of Isadora Duncan in a bare chamber of Alexandra Palace came next.