Take four ballets, two made by female choreographers and two by Black male choreographers; add two conductors, one male, one female, and four living composers, including a woman who plays strings for Brian Eno. Sometimes a recipe that looks enticing on paper fulfils its promise – and Encounters, which has all of these ingredients, makes for a tangy, thrilling evening of dance.
Different viewpoints offer different feelings, different thought patterns. The sensation of the night was Or Forevermore by the American Pam Tanowitz, which brought a cheeky wit and virtuosic cleverness to steps that matched the blasting brass and sudden shocks of Ted Hearne’s bracing score.
An extension of her Dispatch Duet (2022) for Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell, it begins with those dancers in velour tracksuits made to match the Royal Opera House stage curtains, but with PT embossed in gold on the back rather than ER. That irreverent humour persists throughout a work that takes the sophistication of classical dance and constantly subverts it.
It’s full of fun – a boy bouncing high in a sequence of jumps behind a chorus line of dancers in brightly coloured, two-tone leotards; a disembodied hand appearing from the wings to offer support in an arabesque; a line of women perched prettily on the backs of men on all fours, like so many footstools. But it’s also shot through with moments of beauty, particularly in the sections where Bracewell and O’Sullivan catch and entice each other in steps of extended shape and sharp speed, somehow suggesting mysteries amid its playful, gorgeous boldness.
It makes Joseph Toonga’s Dusk, the other new work on the programme, look positively polite in comparison, yet this is the most interesting incarnation so far of his experiments in mixing his own hip-hop vocabulary with classical technique, as two men and five women suggest gentle, familial emotion in choreography that contrasts powerful, torquing arms with graceful feet. The score, by Marina Moore, which incorporates sound and birdsong, wraps the piece in suggestive richness.
The show is completed by Kyle Abraham’s gentle, thoughtful The Weathering (2022), which conjures love and loss, particularly in haunting solos for Melissa Hamilton and Joshua Junker, and by Crystal Pite’s punchy, terrifying The Statement, an indictment of a political class who encourage conflict and seek to wash their hands of its effect. Made in 2016, its movement synched to Jonathon Young’s text, its power only increases with time, and it’s danced with sinuous precision here by Joseph Sissens, Ashley Dean, Kristen McNally and Calvin Richardson, slithering and sliding around a conference table under Tom Visser’s accusing light.
Fresh thinking is the key too to Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Luna, premiered in Birmingham earlier this month. It brings five female choreographers together under a thematic umbrella generally stressing the empowerment of women, with decidedly mixed results. Some very talented dance-makers – Wubkje Kuindersma, Seeta Patel, Thais Suárez, Arielle Smith and Iratxe Ansa – seem constrained rather than liberated by the theme of the moon, with the choreography only intermittently springing to engaging life.
On the other hand, Kate Whitley’s score, which incorporates arrangements of Fauré and the theme tune of Casualty, is ambitious and arresting. The sections for the children’s chorus are rousing and beautifully staged, and the dancers look at once powerful and freed in a work that, for all its flaws, is undoubtedly welcoming in its attempt to do something new.
Star ratings (out of five)
Encounters: Four Contemporary Ballets ★★★★
Birmingham Royal Ballet: Luna ★★★
Encounters: Four Contemporary Ballets is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 16 November
