Carmen Herrera was a painter of space, an artist who evoked infinity. Wayne McGregor’s new ballet, Untitled, 2023, was inspired by her. Before her death last year, at the age of 106, she designed its set – a great slash of green in acres of white, a triangular sculpture.
The shape of its title (Untitled, followed by a date) is informed by the way she often named her geometric, abstract paintings. More importantly, the shape of McGregor’s choreography feels impelled by her clarity, by her cool concerns. The green and white costumes by Burberry carve the dancers’ bodies into angular forms; lighting designer Lucy Carter bathes the entire stage in shifting washes of subtle colour. At one point, a group of dancers gather in the distance, seeming to recede into a distant perspective.
As in Russell Maliphant’s Vortex, inspired by Jackson Pollock, the dancers seem to be used as the marks on the canvas, somehow conjuring Herrera’s brushstrokes, delineating presence and absence in the sharpness and softness of their movements. Set to melancholy, edgy music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (her pieces Catamorphosis and Metacosmos), Untitled, 2023 feels like an elegy, a tribute full of a certain sadness.
It opens with an extraordinary solo for Joseph Sissens, carving the air with jumps that seem made of fierce angles, then landing and letting his body fall into sinuous, melting shapes. A later duet sees Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell tip into forward arabesques, their hands touching the floor; she sits on his knee and makes a square. As the dancers hold their poses, they seem to be listening, pausing thoughtfully in time. At the close, Calvin Richardson is still turning as the curtain falls. It’s wonderful.
How lucky the Royal Ballet is to have McGregor as resident choreographer at the same time as Christopher Wheeldon is artistic associate. Both men are working at the height of their powers, creating works that showcase the talent of the company, pushing on in their own explorations of what a dancing body can do.
Wheeldon’s Corybantic Games, first seen in 2018, responds to the five movements of Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade with wit and flair. The piece becomes like an Olympics of polyamorous love, opening with a taut, muscular duet for Matthew Ball and William Bracewell, at once competitive and supportive, women (Kaneko and Letícia Dias) floating alongside them like 1920s beauties, twisting gracefully. As it progresses, it nods to Broadway as well as Les Sylphides, creating groupings of poised beauty and steps of power, panache and invention.
In this company, Kenneth MacMillan’s one-act version of Anastasia suddenly seems a bit old hat. When it was first seen in 1967, it was radical both in its choice of subject matter – the fate of Anna Anderson, a woman who believed she was Anastasia, only survivor of the Romanovs – and in the way it mixed film of the Russian tsar and his family with expressionistic dance.
Now we know Anderson was deluded, and the use of film slows rather than deepens the action. The whole piece feels plot-heavy. But the choreography, with its darting runs around the stage, and its sharp little jumps of desperation, is still incisive – and the drama of the role gives Laura Morera a perfect way to say goodbye after 27 years with the Royal Ballet.
