The big dance hit of this year’s Edinburgh international festival was Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright’s reboot of Coppélia, using live video to enhance clever storytelling. This triple bill by Birmingham Royal Ballet features another new piece by Runacre-Temple, with Wright working on the film, which continues the pair’s quest to bring dance’s use of video technology into the 21st century.
Hotel is a half-hour ballet, but it packs in different ways to use the camera on stage. The hotel setting is a handy scenario for CCTV-style surveillance behind closed doors – although what is happening there isn’t always as exciting as you might hope.
The dancers become camera operators, with a live feed projected on the set behind them, and it’s interesting to be able to see the same thing from multiple angles: the dancers on stage moving away from you, while the video shows their faces coming towards the camera. Another effect of the lens is to make something interesting that wouldn’t seem that way from a distance, a man peeling a potato, for example, by zooming in on his hard stare.
There are some very clever effects, having real-life dancers partner with projections, and it’s all technically tight. The designs, by Linbury prize winner Sami Fendall give the feel of a vaguely sinister institution, in shades of disappointingly drab greige, but the action does eventually get more colourful before veering off in a surprisingly surreal direction.
This triple bill has a focus on dance’s affinity with music. The score for Hotel by Mikael Karlsson is mostly about tone and atmosphere-building, but the other two pieces in the bill use music more as a blueprint for choreography. Jiří Kylián’s Forgotten Land is an engrossing piece made for Stuttgart Ballet in 1981, set to Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem. Written in 1940, the music is a memorial but so much more than a lament. It sounds like Bernstein at times, full of theatre, surge, swell and syncopation.
Kylián was inspired by the paintings of Edvard Munch, but he is really in bed with Britten’s score, tightly tied to the music. Principal dancer Céline Gittens fully inhabits the choreography, her pas de deux with partner Tyrone Singleton elegant but ominous, a storm coming. Gittens has the ballerina’s instinct for drama, but it is all there in the score already, the striving, yearning, mourning and the dramatic shape and propulsion, without any need for literal narrative.
The Seventh Symphony, a 1991 piece by German choreographer Uwe Scholz, dances to Beethoven’s eponymous work, matching the quick, precise enunciation of the composer’s melodies with a great bolt of positivity. The dancers really get some speed going – except in the slow movement, where recently promoted principal Yaoqian Shang is imperious in her stately control – and the sparkling smiles and sharp arabesques of the massed, neatly organised ranks is reminiscent of Balanchine.
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director Carlos Acosta is doing a great job of bringing to the UK works and choreographers, such as Scholz, who aren’t much seen here, and carving out a niche for his company that’s much more than a lesser, or “regional”, version of their Covent Garden cousin the Royal Ballet. This is a substantial evening, at almost two and a half hours, with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia playing with clarity, vim and fulsome sound under the batons of Thomas Jung and Koen Kessels and strong dancers still bright with allegro energy to the end.
At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 5 November.
