Tag Archives: Birmingham Royal Ballet

Review – Birmingham Royal Ballet BRB2, Carlos Acosta’s Classical Selection, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, 25th May 2024

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Almost thirty years ago (gasp!) the Royal Ballet started their occasional touring production of Dance Bites; regular visitors to the Swan Theatre, High Wycombe (our nearest decent theatre at the time) over a period of four years we enjoyed the likes of Darcey Bussell, Adam Cooper, Jonathan Cope, Deborah Bull and the two Billys (Trevitt and Nunn) performing short, stunning pieces, largely choreographed by the new young stars of the day. They were fantastic nights out, and the memory of them remains a true pleasure.

Fast forward to today, and Carlos Acosta has put together a programme of twelve short pieces for his Classical Selection tour, performed by some of the younger members of the Birmingham Royal Ballet – BRB2, a name modelled, no doubt, on the fantastic NDT2, the youth department of the Nederlands Dans Theater who have always been at the forefront of showcasing their young dancers. So we were very much looking forward to seeing what BRB2 can do – and it was a thrilling performance.

With a combination of recorded soundtracks and live music from Jeanette Wong on the piano and Antonia Novais on the cello, the dancers covered a whole range of styles from the ultimate classic Swan Lake to modern interpretations of Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. The first half of the show was devoted to traditional classical ballet – with just a hint of modernity; the second half to contemporary dance – with just the occasional hint of classicism. It’s a superb blend.

The presentation of the show is refreshingly unstuffy. I’m a big fan of going full pelt on classical ballet, with several dancers modestly surrounding the main performer and graciously recognising their talent, pausing for a round of applause every few minutes. It’s stylised, rewarding, and unique. But the presentation of this show is the complete opposite – and it really works. The curtain rises to reveal a long barre at the back of the stage, towards which the dancers unceremoniously make their way, change out of their day clothes and do a gentle warm-up, whilst chatting to and supporting each other. Then a curtain falls in front of the barre and the first pair of dancers emerge to perform their piece.

When it’s over, they take their applause, and then we see them make their way back to the freshly revealed barre, clearly discussing how the performance went. This structure continues throughout the first half; in the second half, the barre is occasionally removed for a blue background that provides the scenery for a few short dances that merge into each other. At the end, they all return to the barre, pack up their dance bags and drift off into the wings. It’s a very unshowy approach, very much in keeping with the youth of the performers. And don’t worry, you do get the chance to give them a final big round of applause at the end.

The first dance was the pas de deux from Rhapsody, choreographed by Ashton, and danced superbly by Alisa Garkavenko and Mason King; then came the pas de deux from La Sylphide danced with charm and grace by Sophie Walters, and a bravura performance from Tom Hazelby. Next came the Act II pas de deux from Swan Lake, with Maïlène Katoch exquisite in her balance and expression, faultlessly supported by Alfie Shacklock: for me the best partnering of the first act. Alexandra Manuel and Oscar Kempsey-Fagg then performed Dying Swans. Not just the traditional Saint-Saëns/Fokine swan but accompanied by an Acosta-choreographed contemporary addition; I was uncertain of this duet at first but quickly realised how clever the updating of it is. The first act finished with the return of Alisa Garkavenko and Mason King in the pas de deux from Diana and Actaeon; both on terrific form and with some crowd pleasingly elegant and dynamic solos.

After the interval, the mood changed with the return of Alexandra Manuel and Oscar Kempsey-Fagg in Ben Stevenson’s End of Time, performed to the third movement of Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata in in G Minor. Simply but stunningly staged, it was another immaculate performance of a truly powerful dance. The mood then changed again as the set became an Argentinian nightclub with Gustavo Mollajoli’s crackingly exciting A Buenos Aires, a cunning combination of tango with classic and contemporary styles, rivetingly performed by Maïlène Katoch and Tom Hazelby. Then Ariana Allen performed a truly eloquent solo to Edith Piaf’s Je ne regrette rien, followed by an (almost) show-stealing dance by Jack Easton as Brel’s drunken antagonist in Les Bourgeois, combining brilliant dance with comic characterisation.

The final three pieces were a simply romantic dance to the second intermezzo of Bizet’s Carmen, choreographed by Carlos Acosta and movingly danced by  Alexandra Manuel and Oscar Kempsey-Fagg; then a more challenging modern piece choreographed by Will Tucket entitled Mirrored, danced by Frieda Kaden and Jack Easton to music by Ravel. The finale came with Jorge Garcia’s joyful Majisimo, with four couples dancing to several styles from across Spain in a combination of classical and contemporary choreography – a true crowd pleaser to finish.

It’s a terrific way to expose the younger dancers to a variety of styles and audiences, and they all thoroughly earn their stripes! These are not ballet stars yet; but many of them will be. If I were to highlight the dancers whom I think have the full potential to make it big, I would plump for Alexandra Manuel, Maïlène Katoch, Jack Easton and Tom Hazelby; but everyone gives an immense performance and show the Birmingham Royal Ballet to be in the rudest of health! Their tour continues to Canterbury and Peterborough – very well worth catching!

4-starsFour They’re Jolly Good Fellows!

Review – Seasons in our World/Peter and the Wolf, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, 15th May 2019

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It’s been a couple of years since the Birmingham Royal Ballet danced their way onto the Derngate stage – and many years before that since we last saw them at the Birmingham Hippodrome. So it’s always a pleasure to have the opportunity to enjoy some first-rate dance and a quality live music performance from the Royal Ballet Sinfonia. For our performance, the company’s principal dancers were resting so it was an interesting chance to see some of the younger performers have their time to shine.

The first piece, Seasons in our World, was inspired by a poem by David Laing, Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire, no less, and balletomane to boot. Its rather complex birth was a result of several discussions and workshops between its three young choreographers, Laura Day, Lachlan Monaghan and Kit Holder, who are all members of the company. Ms Day wanted to create the Spring section of the work. Mr Monaghan, who is Australian, wanted to incorporate the dangers of a too-hot Antipodean climate into the Summer section, whilst Mr Holder choreographed Winter. They also collaborated with award-winning composer Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian in creation of the accompanying music.

The result is a very enjoyable, if difficult to follow, thirty-five minutes of elegant, delicate, even fragile choreography, performed with great skill and grace by the company. It’s a feast for the eyes, with shimmery, sensual costumes, stunning lighting, and clever interaction between the dancers and the see-through scenery panels. Dancers perform in threes, and in couples, and with some excellent solo work by Haoliang Feng (I believe). The Winter section offers a little more humour than the rest of the dance, with sequences where the dancers huddle together like freezing penguins; although their close work together reminded me more of the background characters in Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances (which is no bad thing). The music is very suggestive and full of mini-melodies that you think are going to take off but then they stop and move on to another theme; very evocative to listen to, but also very disconcerting, and with some surprisingly harsh percussion, no doubt there to reflect the potential harshness of climate.

I enjoyed it, and I liked very much how Winter turned into next year’s Spring; but I couldn’t help but think it lacked a certain something. Maybe having three choreographers equals too many cooks? Certainly you wouldn’t say that the piece as a whole had one vision; but then, I guess, that wasn’t the idea in the first place. No question as to the quality of the dance though, it was elegant and beautiful throughout.

I still have the Music for Pleasure recording of Peter and the Wolf performed by the Little Symphony of London and narrated by Paul Daneman – I must have been about nine when I got it. I loved it – and as a result would pompously announce that Prokofiev was my favourite composer; and, the best part of fifty years later, he’s still very high up there in my affections and respect. Peter and the Wolf is awash with brilliant tunes, lush orchestrations, and creative recreations of animal interaction as portrayed by an orchestra. The slinky movement of the cat on the clarinet, the awkward grumpiness of the duck on the oboe, the featherweight frippery of the bird on the flute, the sinister stealth of the wolf are all beautifully realised; plus, of course, Peter’s youthful self-confidence on the strings and the swagger of the triumphal march at the end.

Naturally, it lends itself perfectly to the medium of dance, as the inventive choreographer Ruth Brill, also a member of the company – this evening’s entertainment is nothing if not in-house – expertly proves. Updated from its original pro-Soviet propaganda background of 1936, this production sets it in some municipal backyard, with a dirty old dumped armchair, a broken supermarket trolley, bin stores and some construction scaffolding. At first, I couldn’t see how that would work at all, but you very quickly realise that it fits like a dream. And the cast of characters bridge both this urban setting and the imaginary meadow setting of the original perfectly.

Karla Doorbar’s Peter (yes, a female Peter because the character is “defiant, goal-driven, carefree, moving on instinct” according to Ruth Brill) is a trendy, Sporty-Spice kind of girl, clearly able to take charge of any situation. Gus Payne’s bird is dressed in blue with a flapping yellow jacket, which again represents both the animal and the trendy young urbanite. Alexander Yap’s wolf is in a grey hoodie, Alys Shee’s duck is welded to her headphones, Eilis Small is in black boots, Max Maslen’s Grandfather in comfortable loungewear and the hunters are all girls about town.

It’s a very effective set of characterisations, and the choreography uses all the available space, on and off the construction site, with great inventiveness. Being really picky, there were a couple of moments though where the choreography just didn’t tie in with the narration. For example, Hollie McNish’s enjoyable and conspiratorial voice tells us “Peter, sitting in the tree, said “Don’t shoot!”” But she wasn’t sitting in the tree, she was down near where we imagine the pond to be. Koen Kessels’ orchestra did a magnificent job with Prokofiev’s score, and, quite apart from being a thoroughly enjoyable dance to watch, it was a true treat for the ears too. But the dancers were all on absolute top form and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It has to be said; this is quite an odd combination of pieces, as Seasons in our World is rather difficult to follow as a narration, whereas nothing could be more straightforward in the story-telling department than Peter and the Wolf. And for a show that would naturally attract many children to the audience, I would imagine the first dance would perplex a number of youngsters, who would get fidgety as a result. For a young-at-heart adult like myself, the programme was an enjoyable mix of the challenging and the reassuring. After its couple of nights in Northampton, the tour continues to Shrewsbury, Malvern and Wolverhampton. Recommended!

Review – An Evening of Music and Dance with the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, Derngate, Northampton, 20th January 2018

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Having an affinity for a particular theatre company, or dance company, or orchestra, is a matter of habit. For four years from 2003 to 2007 Mrs Chrisparkle and I were regulars at the Birmingham Royal Ballet. We would take our little nieces, or our Godchildren, plonk them down in the middle of the Birmingham Hippodrome stalls and they would be overwhelmed with the excitement, the colour, the beauty and the artistry of the dancers. We used to love it too. Then for some reason, we stopped. Mentally I still admired them from afar, but it’s taken ten full years since then to re-establish our proper and much missed acquaintance.

David Bintley, who compered this evening of Music and Dance, told us these shows were a regular phenomenon in Birmingham and have gone down a storm at the Symphony Hall for many years. For the first time they were stretching their wings and taking the show out of town – first stop (and indeed, only stop) Northampton. Thank you so much for thinking of us, BRB, because this was an evening of unmitigated delight that transported the audience from a wet January Saturday to a land of magic and escapism. Everything was beautiful at the ballet, sang the girls from A Chorus Line and if you ever needed proof of that, look no further.

When you enter the auditorium, the Royal Ballet Sinfonia are all in place on the stage and there’s a large empty area in front of them where the dancers can perform. Will the orchestra distract from the dancers? Will the dancers distract from the orchestra? Neither, somehow the staging seems to complement each other perfectly. Our conductor was Paul Murphy, an enthusiastic chap who’s not above encouraging the orchestra with a bit of jazz hands when a mere baton isn’t enough. He reminded me of a clean-shaven, smartened up and sober version of Father Jack. His utter delight in his work clearly transmits itself to the orchestra who in turn convey it to us. When you see an orchestral performance with a soloist on the violin or the piano, you know that the conductor has to split his attention 50:50 between orchestra and soloist. Similarly, it was fascinating to see how Mr Murphy had to keep one eye on the dancers as well as his musicians in order to keep perfect time with their moves. I’m sure that’s a particular skill that takes many years to achieve and he did it brilliantly.

The structure of the show is that the Sinfonia performs one orchestral piece, then dancers come on stage and the Sinfonia play the accompaniment; then another piece, then another dance, alternating throughout the evening so that we enjoy twelve items in all – six orchestral pieces and six dances. To be honest, the balletomane in me would have been happy for each of the twelve pieces to have featured dance – I guess that’s what I was expecting – but I appreciate that the alternating pattern sustained the variety of the entertainment, which was probably wise. You can have too much of a good thing, after all.

We started with the cute confection that is the prelude to Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel – Mrs C was a little disappointed that this wasn’t an orchestral version of The Last Waltz – and then our first dance was the Act III pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Can’t beat a spot of Petipa, and Principal Dancers Céline Gittens and Tyrone Singleton danced it magnificently, decked out in stunning white brocaded costumes. It wasn’t until this first dance that I realised our third row seat gave us an unusually close view of classical ballet – normally with an orchestra in the pit in a large theatre even front stalls seats can feel quite distant from the dancers. Not so this time; and our proximity to the stage gave me an opportunity to concentrate on the technical achievements of the dancers – the balance, the strength, the accuracy, which I find irresistibly rewarding to observe.

Elgar’s Wand of Youth Suite no 2, The Wild Bears, followed; I’d never heard it before and I was impressed by the way the orchestra threw themselves into its frenzied excitement – one of those pieces that is just great fun. Then our next dance was the pas de deux from After the Rain, by Arvo Pärt, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon. The poignant, elegant music is played by just the solo violin – Sinfonia leader Robert Gibbs – and solo piano, played by Jonathan Higgins, which made a solemn contrast with the liveliness of what had gone before. It was danced by Principals Jenna Roberts and Iain Mackay on his very final show with the company; he’s been 19 years with the Birmingham Royal Ballet (I’m sure we saw him in Carmina Burana many years ago) and it turned out to be quite an emotional night. The dancers simply immersed themselves in the elegant choreography which managed to be both acrobatic and stately, and the power of the performance was literally breathtaking.

The next musical item was Korngold’s Adventures of Robin Hood Suite, another piece new to me that had something of a military march to it – I have to say it’s nothing like as evocative of Robin Hood as Carl Sigman’s TV theme, but then what do I know? I was more looking forward to the last dance before the interval, the famous and funny clog dance from La Fille mal gardée choreographed by Frederick Ashton. James Barton, fresh from his year dancing in An American in Paris, danced the role of the Widow, with a cheekily sprightly step and a scarcely suppressed titter. Four soloists, Yvette Knight, Laura Purkiss, Yaoqian Shang and Yijing Zhang completed the coquettishly clogging quintet. Enormous fun, and of course such a catchy piece of music played by the Sinfonia.

After the interval, we returned to hear Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance Op 46, No 8; the Slavonic Dances are among my favourite pieces of classical music and they gave it a blistering performance. Next up was Weber’s Spectre de la Rose, choreographed by Fokine and danced by Arancha Baselga and Cesar Morales. A very stylised piece, it features Ms Baselga languishing in a posh chair whilst Mr Morales leaps in through the (imaginary) window and cavorts around her. Despite occupying all the available dance space it still comes over as a remarkably intimate piece; and Mr Morales’ Nijinskyesque leaps were pretty phenomenal. A perfect balletic blend of the pure and fragile with the powerful and muscular – a superb performance.

The Sinfonia then played Sibelius’ Valse Triste, a delicate and moving little piece that sways along; perhaps a little faster than it is normally played, and I think all the better for it. Compere David Bintley returned to introduce Jenna Roberts and Iain Mackay in what was to be his very final dance on stage in his career, Bintley’s own choreography to the much-loved Adagio from Spartacus by Khachaturian, a personal parting gift to the dancer from the director. Mr Mackay danced Spartacus and Ms Roberts his wife Phrygia, in a piece where she informs him she would be giving birth to his son. It was a truly wonderful piece of choreography; very moving, very joyous, and absolutely jam-packed with all different sorts of emotions. Fokine marvellous, in fact.

Before the final dance fireworks (Mr Bintley’s words – and so right he was), the Sinfonia performed two dances from Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, the instruments positively buzzing with Falla’s fiery orchestrations. Our last item was the pas de deux and solos from Don Quixote; Petipa at his extravagant best. The dancers were Principals Momoko Hirata, performing those crowd-pleasing pirouettes with total joy, and Mathias Dingman who attacked those solo show-off sequences like there’s no tomorrow – his brisés in particular were immaculately executed.

The final standing ovation went for a very long time, with of course special hugs and appreciation for Iain Mackay’s two decades of duty with the company. What a hugely entertaining show; every orchestral piece brimmed with excitement, and every dance was in-your-face fantastic. It was a real privilege to be there. Birmingham Royal Ballet, I apologise for ignoring you over the last ten years. It’s been too long. Hope you’ll make this a regular date and even bring one of your full-length ballets our way some time soon.