When Bronislava Nijinska was trapped in Russia during the years of revolution and war, she was drawn into the creative ferment that saw old cultural forms shattered alongside old political ideologies. Even today, you can feel that energy roaring through Les Noces, the ballet she choreographed for the impresario Sergei Diaghilev in Paris in 1923.
The Stravinsky score to which its set is itself a masterpiece, but it's the geometric configurations and fraught body shapes of the choreography that give the ballet its monumental impact. Ninety years on, it's like watching a great modernist artwork being freshly constructed in front of your eyes. Equally powerful is the emotion that burns on stage. Nijinska's austere evocation of a traditional peasant wedding portrays the story of small lives, especially women's lives, being swallowed up by collective forces. At the end, when the bride passes through the bedroom door, we feel the chill of human sacrifice.
I love the Royal for keeping this huge, difficult work in its repertory; I love, too, the decision to programme Les Noces alongside Ashton's A Month in the Country: a very different portrait of a Russian marriage, with its own glimpse of hell.
Among an excellent opening cast, Zenaida Yanowsky gives one of the performances of her life as Natalia Petrovna. Bored, imperious, volatile, and hollowed out with desire, her finest moment comes at the end when, bereft of her lover Beliaev, she seems to physically harden and shrink, succumbing to a bleak, loveless middle age.
The evening's light relief comes with Ashton's Birthday Offering, a piece of dazzlingly tricky classical invention. And this summer, as athletes aim to smash every world record, it's worth noting that in 1956 (when the work was created), the Royal could field seven ballerinas capable of inspiring choreography that, even today, pushes dancers to the edge of their musical and technical limits.
