Former Royal Ballet principal Federico Bonelli took over the artistic directorship of Northern Ballet last year – and walked straight into a funding crisis. An announcement last month suggested that, thanks entirely to a desperate need to cut costs, the company will give up its use of an orchestra and live music for many of its touring performances.
This – another instance of the meaninglessness of the government and Arts Council England’s levelling up policies – is a scandal. Not all performances need live music, but every serious dance company should be able to use live music if it wishes. The importance to Northern of that possibility is revealed in Generations, its new triple bill of dance to chamber music – two to radiant live performances from Northern Ballet Sinfonia musicians and one to a pre-recorded chamber quartet.
The link between sound and action is particularly acute in Hans van Manen’s classic Adagio Hammerklavier from 1973, inspired by an unusually slow performance of the adagio from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 29 in B flat major, beautifully played here by Colin Scott. The result is a study in glacially unfolding movement for three couples, arabesques and lifts flecked with bent knees, crooked arms, deep falls and pliés.
Fifty years on, Van Manen’s work stands the test of time. Benjamin Ella’s new creation, Joie de Vivre, again for three couples, and set to Sibelius pieces for piano and violin, is unlikely to last that long. Ella, a Royal Ballet dancer and a fledgling choreographer, has a pretty way with steps and the dancers are full of personality, but there’s not much depth to the dance.
Tiler Peck, on the other hand, is beginning to make her mark as a choreographer, even while at the height of her career as a performer with the New York City Ballet. All her musicality and sense of speed are woven into Intimate Pages, to Janáček’s String Quartet No 2, as she sets nine dancers spinning around a central male figure who seems to be longing for love.
There’s a lovely momentum to the piece as it constantly shifts groupings, creating a series of trios that line along the back of the stage like a chorus line, or sends women running into the wings, full of vivacity and life. It is so responsive to the music that live musicians are missed.
Music is the key to French choreographer Maud Le Pladec’s Twenty-Seven Perspectives, a fiercely theoretical examination of the heard and the unheard in Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Made in 2018 but only now getting its UK premiere, it channels the work through a specially written score by British composer Pete Harden.
Ten dancers walk on dressed in casual clothes, and noodle around to the music. Sometimes they respond to what we are hearing – sudden swooping loops to a particular phrase – sometimes their movements, always relaxed, always intriguing, play out to a score in their own heads.
Occasionally, excitingly, they all move in unison as Schubert’s progressions ring out. Later, they drop off stage and sit in the stalls as the lighting darkens and the work unspools into a series of solos. There are about 15 perspectives that feel unmissable; the rest seem repetitive – though that is possibly the point.
Star ratings (out of five)
Generations: Three Short Ballets ★★★★
Maud Le Pladec: Twenty-Seven Perspectives ★★★
