Arts companies need their friends, never more so than now. The Royal Opera House, which has just lost 10% of its Arts Council funding, relies for support on the Friends of Covent Garden. The ROH marks the membership scheme’s 60th birthday with a bustling ballet bill (which the Friends have sponsored. Get yourself friends who will pay for their own party).
Ballet galas can feel scrappy – a tasting menu of show-off delicacies, zhuzhed and tweezered but not enough to satisfy. Here, the evening begins with three pas de deux that trace a path from flirty (Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée) to horny (by Wayne McGregor) via the desperate ardour of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, danced by a fragile, nuzzling Akane Takada and her devoted Calvin Richardson. They’re all nice enough, but hardly get the party started.
Friends schemes also enable creative ambition – not just helping to keep the lights on but bringing new work into the world. The second act here offers four world premieres – two of them genuinely zesty. See Us!! by Joseph Toonga (the Royal’s Emerging Choreographer) is a punchy, gathering storm of a piece with strong protest vibes. The always excellent Joseph Sissens leads a pugnacious ensemble, moving with heft and working Toonga’s hip hop moves into their classically trained bodies. Seemingly on the frontline of defiance and defence, it’s not very gala – but that’s no bad thing.
Nor is the new duet by in-demand New Yorker Pam Tanowitz, which cuts through the evening like a cheek-puckering wedge of lemon. It’s a terrifically astringent piece, danced with verve by Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell. To a snarling, snappy score by Ted Hearne, Tanowitz assembles sawn-off sequences of tight spins, rapid skedaddles: it feels like watching crash test dummies put through their paces, testing the limits of their factory settings. Tanowitz has another ROH premiere in February – don’t miss.
The two other new works are less arresting. Natalia Osipova and Steven McRae are bereft and argumentative in a relentlessly churning duet by Rambert’s Benoit Swan Pouffer. Valentino Zucchetti’s Prima gathers four ballerinas including Francesca Hayward. Set to Saint-Saëns’ romantic flurries, with startling costumes in pick’n’mix colours, its neat display solos look pale against Christopher Wheeldon’s all-male quartet For Four (2006), where blokes develop a competitive camaraderie and Marcelino Sambé ignites the stage.
The finale is Diamonds (1967) from George Balanchine’s Jewels. The ensemble is more decorative than dazzling, but it catches fire in the pas de deux. Marianela Nuñez has the ballerina’s gift of making time stand still as she luxuriates in a bend or balance, with Reece Clarke her elegantly attentive partner. Diamonds sparkles over the surface of Tchaikovsky’s score – it isn’t a friendly ballet, exactly, but Nuñez teases warmth from its chilly surfaces.
