Encounters: Royal Ballet review – classic hip-hop, Spider-Man antics and whip-smart satire
In the brochure for the Royal Ballet’s Encounters programme, an evening of four excellently danced contemporary ballets, choreographer Pam Tanowitz spells out what kind of dance she did not want to make: “You know, beautiful, flowing, pushing and pulling.” By chance, those words pretty much describe the work that preceded hers: The Weathering, by fellow American Kyle Abraham, made for the company in 2022. Gauzy tunics are burnished rose and gold, lanterns glow, the orchestra daubs the air with aural brushstrokes, and it takes quite some time before the exquisite dancing begins to yield a sense of inner life. When that does come – companionate duets gusted apart by obliviously passing groups, an introspective closing solo for Joshua Junker that is poised without and troubled within – the intimations of love and loss are worth it; but even here, beauty sometimes dissolves into decorousness.
True to her word, Tanowitz’s new Or Forevermore is neither beautiful nor flowing: it is choppy, bracing in a brainy rather than an emotional or energetic way, and often funny – if you like your humour entirely unsignposted and 100% poker-faced. The kernel of the work is her 2022 Dispatch Duet for dancers Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell – who open this piece in velvet embossed with gold, as if cut out from the stage curtains. There’s plenty more costume fun: put masks on one male duo and they’d basically be Spider-Man; gaggles of dancers are dressed bold and bright as a children’s sticker set; solitary figures in tunics gesture and bow like marionette courtiers. The choreography is dissonant and devilishly detailed, yet Tanowitz keeps showing us its blocky, angular elements – hooked limbs, frieze walks, lineups and lean-tos – and so both keeps the show on its own wayward tracks, and us tied to them.
Also new is Dusk by Joseph Toonga, the only Briton on the programme, which brings Toonga’s background in hip-hop to bear on seven ballet dancers, not forcibly, but still noticeably: you sense it in the snapped shoulders and chest juts that sometimes finish a phrase, in the punch of an arm or the torque of a spine. There’s a strong dramatic arc, the action playing out between a brotherhood (two men) and a sisterhood (five women) while a rectangular frame suspended above tilts like the balance of power between them. Even so, it feels as if dancers and choreographer are still finding their way into their encounter more than building something from it.
The Statement, made in 2016 for Netherlands Dance Theatre, is short, whip-smart and riveting. The second collaboration between choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathon Young, both Canadian, it brings movement into lockstep with scripted voiceovers so that the choreography feels like a needle-sensitive seismograph of spoken interaction. The setup is four people at a table, tasked with releasing a public statement about a cryptic “situation” involving weapons, profits, powers-that-be, evasions and lies. First absurd then increasingly sinister, the drama tightens into paranoia, anxiety and futility as the voices fragment and echo, the dancers’ stabbing fingers, about-turns and swerving skids becoming feints and parries within an obfuscating miasma of disembodied utterances. A dance for our times, indeed.
• Until 16 November
