Friday, October 4, 2013
Penguin Café, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham Hippodrome
It can be tempting to compare David Bintley to the greatest choreographic talent this country has ever produced — Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan — and gripe about his relative shortcomings. (Not the poet Ashton was, not as psycho-sexually adventurous as MacMillan, and so on.)
But it is no shame to be found wanting next to genius. Taken on his own terms, Bintley (artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet for 18 years) is a smart, tasteful and musically aware dance-maker with a rich canon behind him. And, as this mixed bill of his work confirms, he has also also long demonstrated a rare willingness to try new things.
Take E=mc². Created in 2009, this response to David Bodanis's "biography" of the world's most famous equation is, on the face of it, a ludicrous project: aren't science (which sets out to answer questions) and abstract dance (which seeks only to raise them) polar opposites? Yet it is also fascinating.
It opens with Energy, the dancers' fluttering hands and speed-skating-like movements cleverly distilling the convulsive, kinetic fury of Matthew Hindson's score. Mass features three trios, the girl in each acting like a firm but flexible hinge between the two boys — a vivid sense there of molecules uniting to form something of substance.
The close, Celeritas² ("the speed of light, squared") sees Hindson deliver a John Adams-esque chug, and Maureya Lebowitz, Mathias Dingman and others skip in a springy perpetual motion — attractive, and certainly "light" thanks to the bank of glowing bulbs at the back, though out-done in the speed department by the first movement.
Menagerie: Celine Grittens and Tyrone Singleton perform 'Now Nothing' (Bill Cooper)
The strangest and boldest section is the third, Manhattan Project, in which a geisha (Samara Downs) poses gracefully as a seat-rattling rumble thunders from the speakers. This is Einstein's theorum at its most deadly, a visual snapshot of pre-1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki set against the sound of the devastation that was to come.
The company looks marginally less at ease in 1993's elegant Tombeaux, which a then-disillusioned Bintley made as a forlorn memorial to British ballet's past glories. Set to William Walton and packed with Ashtonian physical tropes — from the double tours to the petite batterie and the constantly re-worked "Fred" step — it is as technically demanding as any tribute to Ashton should be, hence perhaps the company's respectful but slightly tense rendering of it here.
BRB is more relaxed in the very different yet itself not un-elegiac "Still Life" at the Penguin Café. This zoological fantasia (also with strong echoes of Ashton) has inevitably lost the novelty that it enjoyed back in 1988, and one or two sections are on the long side.
But Bintley created enduringly strong personalities for each of the endangered species on display here, and Chi Cao is a particularly noble Southern Cape Zebra, Angela Paul a disconcertingly alluring Utah Longhorn Ram and Laura Day an impishly ecstatic Humboldt's Hog-nosed Skunk Flee. Céline Gittens and Tyrone Singleton move like quicksilver and are poignancy itself as the displaced rainforest couple amid all this fading fauna.
Touring until Oct 30. Details and tickets: brb.org.uk
Tickets for the triple bill can be purchased directly at Telegraph Tickets
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/320f7c80/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctheatre0Ctheatre0Ereviews0C10A3558230CPenguin0ECafe0EBirmingham0ERoyal0EBallet0EBirmingham0EHippodrome0Bhtml/story01.htm
