People have been saying that Wayne McGregor’s new Woolf Works has reinvented the three-act ballet, but not so. William Forsythe reinvented the three-act ballet 20 years ago with Eidos: Telos, a mesmerising masterpiece that I found myself recalling as I watched the McGregor. There are many formal similarities: the search for sense through words, the woman facing darkness and death, the central act in period costume, spectacular light, video, ambitious structures on stage, and so on. You get the picture. McGregor’s work isn’t reinventing the wheel — it just reinflates it with a jet of new hot air.
Since last week’s première, every possible view has been taken about Royal Ballet’s Woolf Works, from rapture to loathing. I’m entirely in sympathy with both camps, depending on which bit of the show we’re talking about.
First of the pros is the mesmerisingly beautiful Alessandra Ferri, a revenant from the Royal Ballet’s 1980s, now aged 52, who is still unequalled in her dramatic empathy with asthenia and the pain of living.
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