Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Some people do feel that way about modern ballet, but the narrator of Dante’s Divine Comedy sees this warning on the gates of hell. In Wayne McGregor’s dauntlessly ambitious ballet, Dante (an excellent William Bracewell) is first seen lost, sparring with shadows. Hope isn’t his problem: he has to find a way to live and deserve paradise.McGregor’s 2021 ballet marshals spectacular forces. Turner-nominated artist Tacita Dean and composer Thomas Adès vividly reimagine Dante’s medieval world. Dean’s charcoal-toned Hell is a reversed mountainscape, the peaks stabbing downwards in smoggy lighting. Spiky figures have chalk on their inky costumes: they’re smutched with sin.Adès’s astonishing score – dashingly conducted by Jonathan Lo – opens in clamour and dark romantic torment. Bracewell watches aghast, more in pity than disgust, as the damned rehash their impassioned lusts and longings. The orchestra’s squall impels Francesca Hayward and Matthew Ball’s whirling adulterers; Anna Rose O’Sullivan’s suicidal Dido is pinioned in self-harm. Calvin Richardson’s extraordinary Ulysses, lost and scudding far from home, almost turns inside out, while Melissa Hamilton makes an imperiously insinuating Satan.Virgil (Gary Avis, calm in ochre) and Beatrice (Fumi Kaneko), Dante’s late beloved, conduct him through the afterlife’s rich tapestry. Dean’s Purgatory is dominated by an arresting photo of a Los Angeles jacaranda tree, treated to glow green and violet. Penitents work through their past, making themselves new.
Dante, often a bystander to his own spiritual quest here, finds his own flailing arms and winding feet, and then watches moments from his own previous life with Beatrice, to skirling pipes and drums. Hayward’s younger Beatrice darts like a silvery fish, and then Bracewell and Kaneko run towards joy, arms wide, and all the chimes of the orchestra resound. Paradise awaits.Turning is a recurrent motif here. Sinners circle their own infernal treadmill; penitents revolve and renew; the blessed spin into eternity. In Paradise, Dean’s colourful planetary projections and Adès’ unearthly strings suggest that bliss is beyond simple comprehension, and dancers in silver-sheen bodysuits relish their fleet-footed movement.
In their final duet, an awestruck Bracewell holds Kaneko as if she is made of celestial light, then moves alone towards us, returning to the world.McGregor’s Woolf Works, revived by the Royal Ballet earlier this year, is a searing exploration of mind and memory: how to process the thrill and pain of being alive. The Dante Project emerges from equally profound questions and each individual element is an astonishment: both the designs and score have found independent life beyond the ballet, while McGregor’s first night dancers were gleaming. But for all its marvels, its ceaselessly busy dance doesn’t go deep: I wish it left me thunderstruck.
