There’s no doubting the good intentions of anyone involved in this ballet. BRB’s artistic director, Carlos Acosta, seemed determined to rebalance the dominance of male choreographers by commissioning five women for one production. That there would be too many cooks, however, was all too predictable.
Originally this ballet was going to be the story of Brummie adoptee Malala Yousafzai, but over time that morphed into a more general celebration of women, based on the book Once Upon a Time in Birmingham: Women Who Dared to Dream, and then something woollier, six disparate sections tied together around the image of the moon.
In the end, it was far too wide a brief. The result is Chatroulette-style surprise: what’s going to happen next? It may be Seeta Patel’s fairly literal piece about girls’ dreams, like role play at Malory Towers; or Iratxe Ansa’s anguished semi-abstraction; or a sermonising children’s chorus; or choreography by Arielle Smith or Wubkje Kuindersma.
Feminism gets in a tangle. Cuban choreographer Thais Suárez’s section is mainly a pas de deux where a woman (Beatrice Parma) is reliant on a man (Javier Rojas). In Ansa’s section, Parma is handled by a whole cast of men – she strong in red, they masked in white – and as she is elevated and displayed, it reminds you how by nature the woman is usually the object in classical ballet, something well worth unpicking, but I’m not sure that’s what’s happening here.
That’s not to say there isn’t strong choreography and dancing – Suárez’s pas de deux and Parma are excellent – but it’s an evening of missed opportunities. Patel, for example, usually works in the classical Indian form bharatanatyam, but there are only the merest hints of that here (apart from the rhythms in the score), presumably no time in the creation process to really explore a melding of styles.
Composer Kate Whitley has created the whole score, incorporating Beethoven, Fauré and the Casualty theme tune, but was perhaps too collaborative in giving each choreographer what they wanted. Ultimately, somebody needed to be in charge here.
• At Birmingham Hippodrome until 5 October and Sadler’s Wells, London, 22-23 October
