For more than 20 years, the BalletBoyz have been at the driving heart of British dance culture. Ever since the two former Royal Ballet principals Michael Nunn and William Trevitt got together to form a company in 1999, they have kept themselves on the crest of a wave of creation, never afraid to try something new, whether it was making cheeky backstage films to accompany their work, forming an all-male troupe or turning the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet into a feature film.
They are definitely a good thing. And so is England on Fire, their most ambitious venture to date, and one that brings together 12 dancers, eight choreographers and multiple musicians, composers and creatives to make a work prompted by Stephen Ellcock and Mat Osman’s book of the same name. It doesn’t quite work, but its vision and commitment are convincing.
Like the book, the piece offers snapshots of a country defined by a folkloric past and a troubled present. As a voiceover announces: “Today we will go on a journey,” the piece opens with a section created by the theatre director Ola Ince in which Artemis Stamouli’s frail pixie dream girl struggles to assert herself while shadowy pagan figures lurk on a darkened stage. (Andrew Ellis’s lighting design is moody and magnificent throughout.)
Holly Blakey’s pulsating steps take over, in a section called Ritual, in which the dancers’ pumping elbows and flailing arms propel them across the stage, before Russell Maliphant choreographs Enclosure, a passage of rising spirals and contemplative circles to Cassie Kinoshi’s music. Later, Edd Arnold produces three comic mummers, sparring as they tumble across the stage, and Thick and Tight offer a segment subtitled Rebellion, all writhing bodies and fierce gestures to videos of British icons. Vidya Patel, Lucy Bennett and Shelley Maxwell complete the choreographic lineup.
There’s a post-punk band – Gag Salon – to add energy, and a pastoral-sounding orchestra to create a sustained mood, the scores of different composers roped together by music director Charlotte Harding, who sings of Albion on fire. The flag of St George looms large on the stage. Dancer Harry Alexander flashes across its width on perilous pointe, Oxana Panchenko flutters in a crown and cloak, but blink and the images are gone.
The whole thing is a mess, but compelling and full of something that smells like teen spirit, a sense of resilient revolt that could build something new. A bit like England itself, you might argue.
The problem with England on Fire is that no single contributor ever gets the chance to develop their ideas. The pure pleasure of Death Trap is that it offers a sustained insight into the remarkable imagination of choreographer Ben Duke, by yoking together two works that he has created for Rambert.
Both are darkly comic, their surface sophistication concealing serious and troubling preoccupations with death, loss and sacrifice. Both mix dance, dialogue and music in telling ways and are superbly performed by Rambert’s dancers, who blend fluid technique with effortless acting.
In Cerberus, “as part of a choreographic task”, Aishwarya Raut vanishes stage left and ends up in the underworld, from which an increasingly desperate Antonello Sangirardi, Orpheus-like, attempts to rescue her. The movement is complicated as dancers speed across the stage in endless horizontal tableaux, the steps breathtakingly varied. The music is a heart-rending live mixture of percussion (Romarna Campbell on drums) and Monteverdi, sung with exquisitely phrased feeling by Caroline Jaya-Ratnam.
In Goat (originally seen in 2017), it’s the music of Nina Simone (sung by Sheree DuBois, with Jaya-Ratnam on piano, Campbell on drums and Dave Manington on bass) that provides the inspiration for a troubling examination of the need for sacrifice in extreme times. Duke walks a tightrope between sending up the entire process and unleashing the profound feeling that music and dance together can conjure.
In a community hall designed by Tom Rogers in mustardy hues, a voluble TV presenter (Angélique Blasco) interviews the participants of a ritual about their purpose, quizzing expressive dancers about what they are seeking to communicate (“I think I would have missed that”) while simultaneously misunderstanding the intent of their act. “Are you the chosen one?” she asks Jonathan Wade breezily. “I have to dance myself to death,” he admits, deadpan. “I’ve never done it before.”
Yet the humour freezes when a list of the sorrows and shames in the world that he must atone for is read out; when he collapses, a loving duet of despair administers a sort of resurrection. Just as with Orpheus, it’s hard for love to conquer death, but there’s hope in trying.
Star ratings (out of five)
Ballet Boyz: England on Fire ★★★
Rambert: Death Trap ★★★★★
