Encounters at the Royal Ballet review: spiky and reflective works – despite the hour-long interval

The Royal Ballet’s programme of new and recent work runs almost three hours, and one whole hour of that is interval. I don’t know what hold Big Catering has over the company, but whatever it is, it commits them to seemingly endless intervals, peddling pinot, fizz and shoals of smoked salmon. Good for the bars, bad for the art: it does a quartet of spiky and reflective works no favours to drag out the evening towards the edge of doom.

Oceans rise, empires fall between the first and last pieces, each previously performed here. Opening the show is Kyle Abraham’s The Weathering. It’s a beaut. Exquisitely lit by Dan Scully, paper lanterns glowing through the midnight blue, it offers a haze of relationships. Two ballerinas dart between a gaggle of young guys in silky folds, their soft, grave movement almost ceaseless.

Yet even youthful radiance is marked by loss. A wonderful Joshua Junker steps out of the dance and is left behind. Reaching out yearningly, no hand meets his, alone in this city of lights.

Crystal Pite ends the evening with a bravura quartet. The Statement is set around a wide, polished conference table, with nervous suits in the throes of crisis management – they have created (or at least exploited) a terrible conflict and must now exonerate their bosses while saving their own skins.

Like many of Pite’s pieces, it’s performed to recorded dialogue (by Jonathan Young), which the dancers treat like a satirical score – jabbing fingers, holding up hands in denial, literally putting the spin in spin doctor. Although performed with ninja precision, it doesn’t develop.

If there’s a thread through the evening, it’s about the company, especially its younger dancers, enthusiastically giving themselves to contemporary moves.

Newham’s own Joseph Toonga has been in residence at the Royal Ballet, broadening his hip hop-based vocabulary. His premiere, Dusk, set to a needling, chiming score by Marina Moore, is watchful – people gaze at other movers, wondering whether to follow. Men and women alike announce their presence with a full chest, shoving the air aside with their elbows. Finally, Marianna Tsembenhoi spins alone, a woman feeling her destiny.

Sparkiest of all is the premiere by New York’s ever-questing Pam Tanowitz. The work, titled Or Forevermore, is an eccentric movement machine. The costumes are a riot – some just a lycra inch from Spiderman cosplay, others velour trackies modelled on the opera house’s own curtains.

It’s full of lolloping detail, lever and pivot and toreador face-offs. At its brilliant centre, Anna Rose O’Sullivan’s commanding gleam confronts William Bracewell, panic in his round eyes, both performing miracles of tilt and speed until their batteries run down. Wildly comic yet delivered entirely poker-faced, I suspect the dancers are having a blast.

Royal Opera House, to November 16; rbo.org.uk