Ballet Black: Heroes
25th May 2024
Reviewer: Maggie Watson
On Friday 12th April at Oxford Playhouse Ballet Black presented the world premiere of choreographer Sophie Laplane’s ballet If at First in a double bill alongside a reworking of Mthuthuzeli November’s The Waiting Game (2020), which I first saw at the Linbury Theatre in 2021. The company is touring nationally and I was fortunate also to catch their final London performance in a matinee at the Barbican Centre on Sunday 19th May. The tour continues to Birmingham, Edinburgh and York.
If at First, co-commissioned by Ballet Black and the Barbican Centre, looks at human relationships through the prism of pride and ambition, asking ‘who are the real heroes in our society?’ It opens with a circle of dancers holding mirrors around a strongly vertical central soloist onto whose head a crown is lowered from the flies; it ends with a duet in which two dancers share and exchange their crowns, before one of them, a solitary figure left alone on stage relinquishes hers, laying it before the audience in a gesture of humility. Laplane punctuates the dance’s episodic structure with brief bursts of action to a percussive soundtrack, as dancers compete and challenge each other, seizing crowns from each other’s heads. The scenes in between suggest or enact the strains, tragedies and joys of daily life, be it a quarrelling couple, the tenderness of a devoted carer, or simply the mutual understanding of two people moving in harmony with each other.
Laplane’s choreography draws out the dancers’ individuality, along with their elegance, vigour, dynamism and control. Within that frame, the performances I saw felt very different: the tension and excitement of the first night in Oxford (on both sides of the curtain!), in London became the confidence and courage to extend every movement to its furthest point, holding nothing back, and the audience loved it.
November’s The Waiting Game is a witty, puzzling, and entertaining take on the problem of the meaning of life, which also examines how difficult it can be to integrate our interior and exterior selves into a coherent personality. The version I saw in 2021 fell into three movements, with dramaturgy credited to Natalie Vijver, and included music from Ljova and the Kontraband’s album Mnemosyne and a recording by Etta James as well as November’s own musical composition. It is now a very different bi-part work, the music credited only to November and Alex Wilson, and without a named dramaturg. The two sections are distinct: the first treats the subject matter metaphorically, the second literally, in the context of the preparation and delivery of a live performance.
I liked the imagery of the opening scene, in which ‘The Man’ (powerfully danced by Ebony Thomas) struggles to control his disruptive inner thoughts, embodied by dancers whom he tries repeatedly to contain behind a door, as they break free again and again looping and whirling around him finding seemingly endless new ways to emerge. The second part shifts from the surreal world of ‘The Man’s’ inner consciousness, and uses recorded voice-over to set the scene, perhaps revealing a lack of confidence in the capacity of dance alone to carry the story. Thomas portrays a reluctant performer, plagued by stage fright and self-doubt, who reluctantly overcomes his inner demons to deliver a triumphant and glittering performance in company with his fellow dancers ‘The Marvellous Monties’. It was a magnificent finale that brought the house down in both Oxford and London.