The reputations of Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan cast long shadows, and it's daunting for any junior choreographer to be programmed alongside them. But Liam Scarlett's is a talent that stands its ground.
Asphodel Meadows, his 2010 setting of Poulenc's double piano concerto, is impressive in so many ways: in its flickering, textured interaction between principals and chorus and in its masterly handling of the music's stylistic transitions. Acid to sweet, jazzy to mournful, it would be easy to let Poulenc's argument dominate the choreography. But Scarlett sidesteps the obvious, and instead draws the music into his own world. It's a world of lovers haunted by death and, in the opening cast, the touchstone performance is Leanne Cope in the middle duet: her limbs liquefying in remembered tenderness and hardening with sudden desire.
There's more Poulenc in Gloria, MacMillan's elegy for the dead of the first world war. Leanne Benjamin is transcendent here: the drama of her phrasing creating an aura of ineffable dignity and sadness and the lightness of her body made almost inhuman through the partnering of Nehemiah Kish. Even more extraordinary is Edward Watson: the raw, haunted depths of his eyes, the racked extremes of his body bearing witness to the hell of the trenches.
And so to Ashton's Enigma Variations. This visualisation of Elgar's score is the most fragile of period pieces, treading a fine line between bluff Edwardian eccentricity and Chekovian interiority. Yet while too many performances tip towards the former, this ballet always moves me. The best of its characterisation is folded into tiny nuances of body language that speak in passionate dialogue with the music. The Nimrod section – where three middle-aged people whose disabling reticence is emphasised by the one yearning rush of emotion they allow themselves – is one of the most affecting moments.
