Marcelino Sambé is hanging upside down from a scaffold tower. “It’s scary,” he tells me. Nevertheless he swings, he swoons, he balances with limbs entwined around the narrow bars, reaching up to an imagined starry sky (it’s actually the high ceiling of a Royal Ballet rehearsal studio in Covent Garden). This is the iconic opening of the ballet Pierrot Lunaire, where a childlike clown is wonderstruck by the sight of the moon.
Made in 1962 by the US choreographer Glen Tetley – whose centenary is celebrated this year – Pierrot Lunaire is a distinctive, eccentric, challenging work, set to Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal song cycle of the same name. It’s based on poems by Albert Giraud, delivered in sprechstimme, a vocal style halfway between song and speech that sounds sometimes like singsong nursery rhymes, elsewhere like a ghostly aural apparition. The ballet is not regularly performed – the last time the Royal Ballet danced it was 20 years ago – but it has a special status in the ballet rep, as a pioneering example of blending modern dance with classical, and as a juicy role for its male lead as the sad clown Pierrot, the commedia dell’arte stock character here given an emotional journey of surprising depth. It was Rudolf Nureyev’s favourite ballet, apparently.
