Royal Ballet triple bill | Dance review

Royal Opera House, London

It was a perverse hitch in the schedules that led the Royal Ballet to open the most sophisticated triple bill of the season on a matinee. The combination of McGregor, Wheeldon and Balanchine is all about glamour, deviancy and artifice, and it demands to be viewed after dark. Yet it was a tribute to the dancers that for two and half hours they made us forget the sun outside.

In Chroma, it wasn't so much individual performances that stood out as the demonstration of how deeply and satisfyingly McGregor's language has become embedded in the Royal's style. Chroma's flaring extremities of line, its darting, slithering, whiplash intensities, have become second nature to the company, and Saturday's cast ditched for good the stereotype that the Royal dance safe and small.

Wheeldon's Tryst also pushes its dancers into fraught terrain, especially its central pas de deux. Melissa Hamilton and Eric Underwood make their debuts this season, and physically they are ideal: the visual contrast of Hamilton's translucent fairness against Underwood's dark skin, the bendiness of both their bodies bring a rarefied strangeness to Wheeldon's choreography. But the couple haven't yet had time to plumb the heart of the duet's burnished intimacy: they don't yet make us believe they are lovers staking everything on this one encounter.

It is emotional chemistry, too, that can elevate Balanchine's Symphony in C into something more than a fizzing cascade of pure dance. Marianela Nuñez and Rupert Pennefather end the second-movement adagio in a dreamily cantilevered, arching embrace, lost to everything but each other's gaze. The moment not only penetrates to the core of Bizet's music, but to the romantic essence of Balanchine's style.

Contributor

Judith Mackrell

The GuardianTramp

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