‘Come up and see my Schieles.’ Those were the words that ended a friend’s fledgling relationship with an art collector. One evening looking at Egon Schiele’s skinny naked scarecrows was enough. Staging Schiele, a one-act dance piece by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, is unsettlingly faithful to the spirit of Schiele’s art. If the skin creeps, if the stalls recoil, then the dancers — one man and three women — have done their job.
The opening solo is danced by Dane Hurst stripped to his pants in a powerful display of athletic narcissism. His only partner is a small hand mirror at which he lunges and thrusts. Hurst sprawls and crawls and scratches and writhes and bends his body into double-jointed spider shapes. He is joined by a trio of female dancers — Catarina Carvalho, Sunbee Han and Estela Merlos — in velvet bralets and high-waisted knickers. They are transfixingly nasty. The invitation ‘Come to the cabaret’ has rarely held such menace. Together they form a cadaverous chorus line, all rib cages, cats’ eyes and hostile sexuality. The line between scrawnily sinister and strip show is narrow and at times this tips into Pussycat Doll provocation. It’s the splits that do it.
Composer Orlando Gough offers a soundtrack of mouthwash gargles and fragments of Schiele’s poetry. Ich bin this and ich bin that. But it’s all about what you see, not what you hear. In tableau after tableau, Schiele’s pained, pinched, impertinent figures are brought feverishly, disturbingly to life.
After the cigarettes and closed rooms of Staging Schiele, the Royal Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty is milk and honey. Oliver Messel’s sets and costumes, first created in 1946, and many times revived and revised since, are a great dressing-up box of art history’s greatest hits.
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