One long moan of woe: Crystal Pite’s Light of Passage, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised imagery, it proposed two ways of interpreting the horrific footage of the refugee crisis of 2016: either as a matter of anonymous, voiceless masses, portrayed as a body of dancers moving across the stage like a skein of migrating swallows beyond reason or control; or as a ragtag of desperate, furious individuals with every dignity and possession taken from them – somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s daughter or son, fighting for survival – a plight conveyed in the impassioned dancing of Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally.

Five years on, Pite has returned to flesh out this fierce and powerful half-hour work with two further sections: one focused on the young, the other on the elderly, and a note of sentimentality has crept in. Six children (junior pupils of the Royal Ballet School) dressed in white, vulnerable and innocent, are supported, shielded and lifted by phalanxes of adults, but it is never clear what they are being protected from.