Sophie Laplane’s new ballet, If at First, is more like 10 different ballets in one. It has a soundtrack that skips wildly between genres – Beethoven to avant jazz to new music by Tom Harrold – as if there’s a glitchy skip button somewhere, jerking from one playlist to another. The only constant is a white crown passed around the stage, anointing characters in turn, mirrors held up to reflect their glory.
This double bill from Ballet Black is titled Heroes in reference to Laplane’s piece, attempting to honour small acts of heroism in the everyday, but the piece has so many facets as to become garbled, pulling from one mode to the next without a sense of who, what or why. The stylistic switches mean we might jump from sultry female duet, to two sweet but tragic lovers, then a gracefully feisty couple where one throws off the other’s body as if to say “good riddance” and then comes back for more, all interspersed with scenes of chaos. A king is crowned, and then a queen, but then the realisation comes: why venerate one person when we can all be heroes? Amen to that.
There’s been quite a change of personnel at Ballet Black in the last couple of years, with a new roster of talented young dancers, but senior members most impress – especially Isabela Coracy, a dancer of presence and composure. Another longstanding company member, Mthuthuzeli November, has now moved mostly into choreography, and his piece The Waiting Game is revived and reworked for the second half of this show, its original run having been truncated by Covid. In The Waiting Game, November has staged an existential crisis. Ebony Thomas gives a fine performance as a man trapped in the purgatory of daily routine, questioning what it’s all for. Thomas cowers in a corner then lurches and leaps as November’s choreography covers the stage with bursts of speed and a myriad of influences. It’s a journey, for sure, and one that takes a thoroughly unexpected turn into more meta territory, revealing the ups and downs of ego, the pressure and duty of a performer’s life. In November’s telling, sometimes it’s heroic just getting through the day.
• At Linbury theatre, London, until 10 November; then at The Lowry, Salford, 20-21 November
