{"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