{"id":147199,"date":"2023-11-10T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-10T19:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/2023\/11\/all-fall-down-13761\/"},"modified":"2024-04-10T11:32:36","modified_gmt":"2024-04-10T15:32:36","slug":"all-fall-down-13761","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/2023\/11\/all-fall-down-13761\/","title":{"rendered":"All fall down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Northern Ballet of Leeds, England, toured its triple-bill program \u201cGenerations\u201d at the Royal Opera House in London last week. The company\u2019s director, Frederico Bonelli, said the title reflects the program\u2019s composition of an established piece by Hans van Manen alongside two new works, one by Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet and the other by Benjamin Ella of The Royal Ballet.<\/p>\n

Ella has described<\/span> his ballet Joie de Vivre<\/i> as \u201ca poem or epigram of human feelings, emotions, and connections\u201d that he hopes will \u201csend you home humming romantic tunes, filled with the joy of life.\u201d (There is nothing to analyze in such a Hallmark-card description of dance; Marius Petipa surely would have said the same about his Sleeping Beauty<\/i>, The Nutcracker<\/i>, and Coppelia<\/i>.) Joie de Vivre<\/i> features three couples and is indeed \u201cromantic,\u201d although to claim it celebrates the joy of life is an overstatement. The thirty-minute ballet depicts adolescent courtship, portraying what a middle-school playground would look like if the kids weren\u2019t glued to their cellphones. The couples engage in dance versions of games like tag and hide-and-seek, gleefully chasing one another on the empty stage. The girls huddle for a pas de trois as if convening to gossip about their dates. The choreography is anti-climactic, but that\u2019s how teenage romance goes: even briefly making eye contact with that super-cute boy in your math class is enough to render the whole day a success.<\/p>\n

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Kirica Takahashi and Jun Ishii in Benjamin Ella\u2019s <\/em>Joie de Vivre. Photo: Kyle Baines.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The production could have benefited from more rehearsal. At times, I wondered whether the choreography was intended to be performed in canon, or if the dancers were unsynchronized because they didn\u2019t know the correct counts. The couples struggled to navigate some awkward transitions in between lifts; likewise, one ballerina missed steps, eyed her peers for choreography clues, fell out of turns (nearly knocking out her fellow dancers), and slipped during an entrance. Despite some obvious stumbles, the ballet is pleasant, albeit unassisted by its plain score of chamber pieces by Jean Sibelius and neither inspired nor inspiring.<\/p>\n

After Joie de Vivre<\/i>\u2019s dancers fall in juvenile love, Adagio Hammerklavier<\/i>\u2019s fall to the ground. Hans van Manen, Hammerklavier<\/i>\u2019s choreographer, called the plotless 1973 ballet \u201can ode to deceleration.\u201d Van Manen found profundity in simplicity, and perhaps the ballet is also an ode to stillness: three couples in unadorned pale costumes begin with subtle but sudden movements to a particularly slow tempo of the Adagio from Beethoven\u2019s Piano Sonata No. 29 as a white sheet flutters behind them. It\u2019s haunting, as though the dancers have been reduced to only their skeletons.<\/p>\n

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Dancers of Northern Ballet in Hans van Manen\u2019s <\/em>Adagio Hammerklavier. Photo: Kyle Baines.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

But bones without muscles cannot stand. The dance critic Zo\u00eb Anderson noted that Adagio Hammerklavier<\/i> <\/i>was made at a time when choreographers were experimenting with complex lifts; presumably, some unfortunate mistrials resulted in women on the floor rather than in their partner\u2019s arms. Van Manen must have then asked the question: what if this falling could be beautiful? His dancers thus collapse into the fetal position, but the audience doesn\u2019t gasp or shudder since we know it is intended. They droop to the floor in grand pli\u00e9s, splits, and lunges. Adagio Hammerklavier<\/i> is essentially a castrated forerunner to Ji\u0159\u00ed Kyli\u00e1n\u2019s Petite Mort<\/span><\/i> (1991), stripped of sensuality but rich with intimacy.<\/p>\n

After Northern Ballet indulges us with simplicity, we are presented with chaos in Intimate Pages<\/i>. The ballet intrigued because of who was offstage<\/i>; the American superstar ballerina Tiler Peck choreographed it as her first piece for a European company. Of the score, Leo\u0161 Jan\u00e1\u010dek\u2019s String Quartet \u201cIntimate Letters\u201d, Peck sas that she hears \u201cyearning, ecstasy, struggle, [and] elation\u201d and that she wants to \u201cdiscover and explore the human emotion and those feelings through dance.\u201d But Peck fails in Pages<\/i> to capture the intense passion of Jan\u00e1\u010dek\u2019s composition, which is sometimes described as a \u201cmanifesto on love<\/span>\u201d that reflected his relationship with Kamila St\u00f6sslov\u00e1, a married woman nearly forty years his junior.<\/p>\n

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Kirica Takahashi in Tiler Peck\u2019s <\/em>Intimate Pages. Photo Kyle Baines.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Peck\u2019s piece opens in silence with a lone male dancer slowly building his energy and exploding into a t<\/i>our en l<\/i>\u2019<\/i>air<\/i>, cueing the intense quartet and dancers, who circle around him as he reaches into the distance. Intimate Pages<\/i> has passion but little intimacy: three women lay their hands on the male dancer, and he looks around cluelessly. After being dragged away by the swarming dancers, he follows the girl teasing him and nearly kisses her. Throughout the twenty-minute ballet, the leading man undergoes something like a midlife crisis in which anger is interrupted only by lust.<\/p>\n

Yet Peck leaves us questioning why he\u2019s so tormented. Do his romantic pursuits prompt his frustration, or does he seek erotic escape from his frustration? The dancers apparently weren\u2019t given clear guidance on which emotions they were meant to embody; they offered a mix of smiles and blank stares. The male lead was executed brilliantly by the former West End star Harris Beattie, but the story around him lacks any detectable coherence. The viewer thus grows as frustrated as him.<\/p>\n

The three ballets are all worth watching, but only Adagio Hammerklavier<\/i> is worth remembering. It is not the type of performance that you sit in the theater and think about; it is the type you\u2019ll think about long after you leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On \u201cGenerations\u201d by Northern Ballet of Leeds, at the Royal Opera House, London.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2510,"featured_media":147586,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","wds_primary_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[472],"tags":[884,745,732,744],"dispatch-city":[3291],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fb0bff29d65","label":"Participants","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"object","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651c536113a8e","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"No","value_formatted":false,"value":"0","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66009169342f2","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":0,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}}},"author_meta":{"display_name":"Abigail Anthony","author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/abigail-anthony\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Screenshot-2023-11-10-at-2.27.24-PM-300x156.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Screenshot-2023-11-10-at-2.27.24-PM.png","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Dispatch<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Dispatch<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["Ballet<\/a>","Books<\/a>","Dance<\/a>","London<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Ballet<\/span>","Books<\/span>","Dance<\/span>","London<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":0,"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 6 months ago","modified":"Updated 4 weeks ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on November 10, 2023","modified":"Updated on April 10, 2024"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on November 10, 2023 2:30 pm","modified":"Updated on April 10, 2024 11:32 am"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["author_meta","featured_img","jetpack_sharing_enabled","jetpack_featured_media_url","coauthors","tax_additional","comment_count","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","series_order","jetpack-related-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2510"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147200,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147199\/revisions\/147200"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147199"},{"taxonomy":"dispatch-city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dispatch-city?post=147199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}