In a rehearsal space at Birmingham Royal Ballet’s headquarters, two dancers are trying to perfect a piece. Soloist Riku Ito is clutching a rubber roll that he’s pretending is a guitar while Javier Rojas circles around, gliding, spinning and sliding through Ito’s legs. “Too soon, Javi!” calls out choreographer Pontus Lidberg. “You need to wait for the high note: da-da-da-da-da-da-DA! And Riku, stop crossing over. You won’t remember that many movements.”
The music they are dancing to is an acoustic guitar piece called Laguna Sunrise, beefed up from its original arrangement with strings and what sounds like mandolin by the composer Christopher Austin. It’s not one of his original works, though: it’s by Black Sabbath, from their otherwise crushingly heavy 1972 album Vol 4 (the one that leaned so heavily on narcotics that it thanked “the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles” in its credits). This sequence will duly appear in the third act of Black Sabbath: The Ballet, almost certainly the first time any of metal’s founding fathers have had a major dance company pay tribute to their work in a full-length show.
