1 Betroffenheit
Sadler’s Wells, London
It was a tribute to Crystal Pite’s choreographic imagination and craft that a work so harrowing in its subject matter should have been so compelling, and even beautiful, to watch. Betroffenheit (the German word expresses a state of traumatised emotion) was created in collaboration with the actor and writer Jonathon Young. Having taken as its starting point the terrible accident that led to the deaths of Young’s daughter, nephew and niece, it explored the condition of human suffering in two hours of raw, heroic and coruscating dance theatre.
At its centre was Young himself, locked inside the hellhole of his grief and guilt, and tormented by voices that either urged him to search for meaning in his own tragedy or alternatively tempted him to escape into the numbing embrace of drink and drugs.
During the first half of the work Young’s performance was a searingly physical embodiment of nightmare as he argued with his private demons, brilliantly depicted as a chorus of trashy and sinister cabaret performers. Pite’s framing choreography was no less extraordinary, especially in the second half where the dynamics and patterns of pure movement were used to evoke a more abstract poetry of grief and redemption and where the dancers were astounding in their responsiveness and clarity.
Betroffenheit was cruelly staunch in its refusal to grant any easy insights into the meaning of suffering or to deliver any consoling promises of recovery, yet the work built to an intensity that was cathartic. Clear-eyed, humane and fraught with a terrible kind of poetry, this work kept faith with the power of art to navigate depths of experience that lie beyond the scope of reason. Read a full review
2. Swan Lake/Loch na hEala
Sadler’s Wells, London
Just when you thought there was nothing new to extract from this overworked and often abused classic, Michael Keegan-Dolan created a version whose bleakness and comedy were touched by moments of pure poetic transcendence. Updating the story to the Irish Midlands (the choreographer’s rich home terrain), Loch na hEala supplied a poignant and brutally credible back story to the ballet’s original narrative while at the same time heightening the magic of its dream logic. Read a full review
3. Akram Khan’s Giselle
Palace theatre, Manchester, and UK tour
It was a spectacularly successful year for Akram Khan. His new Giselle for English National Ballet entirely justified his decision to update the Romantic classic to the wilderness world of migrant workers and refugees. Even if Khan’s choreography did not completely nail the storytelling, it created a transfixing, poetic take on the emotional intensities of the ballet especially in the witchy, spectral point work of Act 2. The ballet was a gift to ENB’s dancers, and it formed a worthy companion piece to Khan’s other 2016 triumph, Until the Lions, a masterly distillation of the epic energies of the Mahabharata. Read a full review
4. La Fille Mal Gardée
Royal Opera House, London
As newly appointed principal at the Royal Ballet, Francesca Hayward had a superb season, displaying her exquisite musicality and intrepid technique across a wide range of roles. Her most captivating debut however was in Frederick Ashton’s Fille, where she was partnered by Marcelino Sambé. Both dancers were skimmingly light and fast in the finely embroidered detail of Ashton’s choreography, but they also brought a very 21st-century charm and naturalism to the lovers’ story that promised a fine partnership in the making. Read a full review
5. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Sadler’s Wells, London, and UK tour
The Ailey company’s dancers would look marvellous in pretty much anything, but the repertory they performed for this UK tour gave fresh insights into their spirit and versatility. While the company brought their traditional mix of sincerity and showmanship to their signature classic Revelations, they were equally fine in Paul Taylor’s witty tango piece, Piazzolla Caldera, Rennie Harris’s hip-hop-inflected Exodus and Christopher Wheeldon’s neoclassical duet, After the Rain. How fabulous they looked too, sharing the stage with the Royal Ballet for the 10th anniversary revival of Wayne McGregor’s Chroma. Read a full review
6. BalletBoyz
Sadler’s Wells, London, and UK tour
This superb all-male company reinvented themselves yet again, with a double bill of work that was unlike anything else on the British dance stage. Pontus Lidberg’s Rabbit was a captivating fusion of surreal imagery and psychological depth exploring the dynamics of loneliness, power play and sexual attraction amongst the men. Javier de Frutos’s Fiction was one of the funniest dances I’d seen in ages, a combination of text and choreography that played dark, mordant games around the idea of the choreographer’s own death. Read a full review
7. Richard Alston
Sadler’s Wells, London, and UK tour
Alston found a fabulous muse and collaborator in Vidya Patel when creating his Scarlatti-inspired An Italian in Madrid. Drawing on the bevelled lines and rhythms of Patel’s classical Kathak training, Alston developed a quasi-narrative language of bright, airy musicality that took his choreography to a whole new terrain. Patel herself was a revelation, spinning soundlessly across a flood of Scarlatti notes, but Alston’s own dancers equally excelled. Read a full review
8. Elizabeth
Linbury Studio theatre, London
Will Tuckett’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth I was a burnished period piece, layering dance, text and music to intelligent and touching effect. Zenaida Yanowsky was at her versatile best in the title role: revelling in the grandly theatrical body language of the young queen, turbulent and expansive in love, and turning progressively brittle and fragile with age. Dancing the five key men in Elizabeth’s life was Carlos Acosta, who was debonair, witty and – as the flamboyantly self-promoting Walter – as funny as I’ve ever seen him. Read a full review
9. For Now, I Am…
Lilian Baylis Studio, London, and UK tour
In this beautifully paced and emotionally transparent solo, Marc Brew re-created the story of his slow return to dance after a car accident left him paralysed from the waist down. It opened in a white, bright hospitalised space where Brew’s dancing was restricted to a choreography of confinement and yearning but progressed through a powerful journey of discovery and endurance, ending in a final liberating apotheosis whose elation felt joyously earned. Read a full review
10. Jane Eyre
Cast, Doncaster, and UK tour
There were moments when Cathy Marston’s new work for Northern Ballet got lost in the detours of Charlotte Brontë’s plot, but it kept exemplary and imaginative faith with the prickly independence and righteous anger of its heroine. Marston displayed a novelist’s attention to nuance as her choreography charted Jane’s journey from the jagged tantrums of her childhood, through the wary self-containment of her adult self, to finding tenderness in her closing love duet with Rochester. Read a full review
