London: A Study in Scarlett and Other New British Dances

For well over a hundred years ballet has grown more and more international. In the nineteenth century a Frenchman, Marius Petipa, largely invented Russian ballet; in the twentieth, the method of an Italian working mostly in Russia, Enrico Cecchetti, helped forge the English style identified with the Royal Ballet, and a Russian of Georgian descent, George Balanchine, emerged as the chief creative force behind American ballet. The twentieth century’s boom in one-act plotless ballets, the rise of modern dance, and especially the expansion of ballet vocabulary through modernist revisions of classical steps and ballet’s absorption of modern dance gestures have, a hundred years later, made national styles harder to recognize in new ballets and modern dances.

Further hybridizing dance’s heritage, choreographers work increasingly on an international scale and schedule, producing new works for companies in many countries and making it trickier to define a “British” style. The English choreographers Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor, and the Russian Alexei Ratmansky, for example, have all made significant works for both the New York City Ballet and the Royal. While choreographers usually shape their ballets to display a particular company’s strengths to advantage, sharing choreographers nevertheless means that companies today more and more share a movement vocabulary. While their differing accents and syntax may still mark them as divided by a common language, it can prove difficult to tell if a work by an English choreographer on an American company looks more “English” than a ballet made by an American for a British troupe. Further, the English character of, say, an abstract work made today by Wheeldon for the Royal Ballet can be impossible to pinpoint. In any event, the fall 2012 London season featured some strong new choreography by British artists, and some strong new works danced by British companies, along with others that looked more run-of-the-mill.

The Royal Ballet’s up-and-coming star choreographer, Liam Scarlett, typifies this international cross-fertilization. Only twenty-six, he has retired from dancing (under the Royal’s stratified system, he ranked as First Artist in the corps de ballet) to focus on choreography as the company’s first-ever Artist in Residence (Wheeldon, a former NYCB soloist, retired from dancing at twenty-nine). Scarlett made his first ballet for the Royal in 2010—at twenty-four, the youngest choreographer to land a Royal commission—yet he created his wonderful new work, Viscera, for America’s Miami City Ballet, early in 2012. Viscera, which I saw in its Royal Ballet premiere November 3 at Covent Garden, is enthralling, a complex and winning work that sensitively and wittily responds to Lowell Liebermann’s Piano Concerto No. 1, excellently played by Robert Clark. Choreographed for a company trained in the speedy style of George Balanchine (Edward Villella, a superb NYCB star for many years, founded Miami City in 1985), Viscera rallies the Royal’s dancers to quickness and precision, qualities not always demanded by its repertory.

Viscera’s structure reflects Liebermann’s traditionally built concerto, with a pas de deux for Marianela Núñez and Ryoichi Hirano as the meditative middle movement, and allegro first and third movements for the thirteen corps dancers, with Laura Morera and Núñez taking turns leading in the first movement and Morera stopping the show in the finale. Scarlett also devised the costumes, sheer black long-sleeved tops and black briefs for the men (the combination of long sleeves with briefs looks awkward) and strapless leotards, a current ballet fad, for the women. The women wear no tights, which can make limbs look coarsely muscular, but under John Hall’s clear, bright lighting, Morera’s well-sculpted, athletic legs, for example, give each kick and thrust additional excitement.

Scarlett has a knack for arranging his dancers in geometric patterns that continually shift, and for using the entire stage to let those patterns evolve. He wisely gives his dancers space to dance, and while many current choreographers have grown infatuated with distractingly knotty partnering, one of Viscera’s visceral pleasures inheres in watching Núñez...