National Ballet 2019-2020 # 4: Stunning Mixed Programme

The National Ballet's mixed programme for March combined one of the most dynamic works in the company's repertoire with a world premiere and a company premiere.  The resulting programme took the audience to limits of energy and emotion in all directions, and has to be ranked as one of the most diverse mixed programmes in recent company history.

Wayne McGregor's Chroma opened the programme.  This extraordinary piece, which fairly sizzles with energy and even danger, was first performed by the National in 2010, and has been revived at least once since then.  It remains for me one of the most memorable among all the splendid commissions of Karen Kain's tenure as Artistic Director.

The irony of the title is that the work is relatively colourless.  The architecturally conceived backdrops and side walls are white.  The dancers wear muted flesh-toned costumes, and as I learned from Stephanie Hutchison's pre-show "ballet talk," the colours are carefully selected to blend in with the individual skin tones of the various dancers.  There are some subtle colour effects in the lighting, but the vibrancy of this piece comes from the energy of the ten dancers.

Once again, the National's gifted artists pushed themselves beyond the limits of physical possibility in McGregor's rapid-fire and incredibly demanding choreography.  Even in the slower sections, the bodies continue to be stretched into contortions that continually leave me wondering, "Did I really see what I thought I just saw?"

The answer, of course, is a resounding "Yes!"  And with a number of relative newcomers to the company fitting right into the work as smoothly as the experienced veterans, the future of Chroma in the National Ballet's repertoire seems assured.  I will always look forward to a chance to see this spectacular piece again.

As I will for the second work, for completely different reasons.  Sir Frederick Ashton's Marguerite and Armand is but one of the more than 100 story ballets which he created during his long and illustrious career, but in many ways it broke new ground at its 1963 premiere.  This half-hour tragedy is kept on a miniature scale by Ashton's decision to display vignettes from the story as flashbacks, rather than trying to tell the entire tale in dance and mime.  The music, an orchestrated version of Liszt's Piano Sonata in B Minor, stands as the utter antithesis of what normally makes a story ballet score "go," yet the choice proved to be an inspired one for this case.  The use of projections on the backdrop was also innovative for its time.  The minimal setting, merely sketching in the opulence of Paris rather than depicting it literally, also foreshadowed future trends in stage design for ballet.

The real story behind the story here is the creation of the work for the immortal partnership of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, and was featured in their farewell performances on Broadway.   No other dancers were allowed to perform it as long as they were alive.  In recent years, the work has been revived several times, and both Zenaida Yanowsky of the Royal Ballet  and Greta Hodgkinson of the National Ballet chose it to be their respective swan songs.  I'm only sorry that I wasn't able to tweak my schedule to take in one of Greta Hodgkinson's performances.

A note about the music: I'm fairly familiar with the Sonata as a listener, but would have to study the score to be sure.  However, I'm tolerably certain that pianist Zhenya Vitort played the entire work as Liszt wrote it, and that Dudley Simpson's orchestration (this is at least the third orchestral version created for this work) merely touched in key notes and phrases in certain scenes to highlight them -- as, for example, the sustained horn chords underlying the slow staccato opening phrases which recur at the midpoint and again at the end.  Vitort's masterly playing of this demanding work could stand comparison with any of the other performances I have heard.

Ashton's fluid, classically-inflected dance vocabulary demands much of the leading couple, since he didn't by any means confine himself to textbook example and precedent in his dance-making.  The intense concentration of the story demands rapid evolution through wildly conflicting states of emotion, with the need for melodramatic intensity never far away.  What makes Marguerite and Armand so memorable, for me, is the way that Ashton shaped the very specific needs of his story, based on Dumas' La dame aux camellias, to the seemingly intractable structure of the Liszt Sonata and pulled all the threads together so unforgettably in the concluding scene, where Marguerite dies to the broken, final, dying utterances of the piano.

Sonia Rodriguez and Francesco Gabriele Frola created real chemistry between them, and a sustained intensity in that final scene which would be hard to beat.  They also excelled in the bigger dramatic moments, such as the scene where Armand rips the necklace from Marguerite's neck and dashes it to the floor.  Intense and memorable characterization married to beauty of line marked the performances of these two fine artists.  

If there's a weak link in this work, it's the virtually identical required movements of Armand's father and of the Duke who takes Marguerite under his "protection ."  Yes, both of these character roles depict gentlemen of breeding, but slavish historical accuracy in this case undermines the different roles that the two play in the drama.  But this is a minor flaw.  The men of the company who portrayed Marguerite's admirers all presented a believable mixture of ardent desire and well-bred restraint.

The last and most stunning work on the programme was the world premiere of Crystal Pite's Angels' Atlas.  Pite first rocketed onto the consciousness of most of the National Ballet audience in 2009 with her previous commissioned work for the company, Emergence.  To say that most of us had never seen anything like it before would be an enormous understatement.

But anyone who came expecting this work to be Emergence, Mark II would certainly have been startled and, perhaps, disappointed.  With some thought, it's possible to detect certain similarities in Pite's dance language compared with that earlier work, but those lie only in the details.  She's far too innovative an artist to be satisfied with retreading old ground.

The point of departure for Angels' Atlas actually lies in the experiments of designer Jay Gower Taylor -- experiments dealing with the use of light on reflective surfaces.  In general terms, Pite has tried to find movement equivalents to the dance of light which can result.  I found that connection a little difficult to make, but there's no denying the power, edginess, and breathtaking beauty of the results.

Taylor's work for this piece has resulted in an evocative backdrop of projected light patterns which shift and pulse, growing, reshaping, fading as if alive and breathing.  I was continually struck by reminiscences of the famous "light show" at the end of Stanley Kubrick's film masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There, too, light became like a living, breathing character in the story, although the means employed were very different.

In front of this pulsating environment of light, a large cast of some 40 dancers moved -- slowly one moment, quickly the next, sometimes all in unison, sometimes broken into smaller groups moving in different styles and different directions.   At key points in the work, the larger cast would dissolve into the wings, leaving a soloist or solo couple holding the stage.  At these points, the choreography grew freer, more diverse.  

The music for this remarkable ballet comprised two works for unaccompanied choir, framing a central section danced to an electronic score by Owen Belton.  Here was where the resemblance to Emergence became most marked, since Belton also created the score for that work.  The bigger framing sections, set to recordings of the Cherubic Hymn by Tchaikovsky and O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen, evoked a strong sense of wonder at the awareness of cosmos, a feeling which Pite said definitely factored into her thinking about the piece.  Lauridsen's piece especially underlined the point with its Latin text beginning, "O, great mystery...."

It was in this final section of the work that the movements of the dancers, the archaic aura of the music, and the glowing clouds and streamers of light merged into virtual symbiosis. 

I was a little doubtful of what to expect, given that Emergence wore out its welcome for me pretty quickly.  In Angels' Atlas, Crystal Pite and her creative team have achieved something both remarkable and genuinely moving.  Like the other pieces on this programme, I would be glad to see this one again -- and soon.  This work is a spectacular jewel in the crown of Karen Kain's years as artistic director of the National Ballet.