Ballet Black: Heroes
19th June 2024
Reviewer: W JQuinn
The outstanding Ballet Black returned to the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh plumb on the theatre’s 30th Birthday. As party guests go, you could certainly do worse than Cassa Pancho’s glorious company of outstanding dancers.
The opening If At First offers a winning combination of Scottish Ballet’s Sophie Laplane’s dynamic, narrative choreography and Ballet Black’s honed physicality. Led by the company’s totemic leading ballerina Isabela Coracy, the piece opens with preparations for her coronation. Centre-stage she is arresting as ever, every inch the monarch to be: fluid, poised, and en pointe. Illuminated by light reflected from mirrors held by surrounding acolytes, and set to a score laced with Beethoven’s Eroica, the scene makes an arresting opening. However before the crown can descend, it is abruptly snatched away.
What follows is akin to a game of game of tig, the white-clad troupe competing to take the crown through ever more adventurous, and often comic sequences. When one of the company does place crown on brow, a vignette ensues. Acaoã de Castro becomes a preening celebrity, preening before the camera flashes cunningly created by the cleverly re-used mirrors. Of course, fame is fleeting, and before long the rest of the cast has lost interest, leaving him to mourn what was.
Perhaps the sweetest scene is a duet between Love Kotiya and Helga Parts-Morales, which seems to chart the former’s evolution from childhood to adulthood, watched over by his mother. Like a baby gazelle, a mercurial Kotiya first learns to stand, before acquiring the crown in a celebratory gamble. Delighted, his guardian looks on lovingly at his triumph, before time claims her, and plunges him into mourning. The crown he realises, was always hers.
This is the heroism of everyday life, a clever repurposing of the Germanic celebration of Napoleonic pomp. Ultimately Coracy does acquire the crown herself, though not before a claustrophobic encounter with walls of her fellow dancers. However a celebratory group dance isn’t the end, that being left to a deliciously bluesy female duet set to Michelle Gurevich’s I’ll Be Your Woman.
The post-intermission The Waiting Game makes sense as a companion piece. Choreographed by Mthuthuzeli November, it’s a nervy, magical realist tale of survival in the 21st century. The piece’s hero, played by an arresting Ebony Thomas frets in his room, attended by a frenetic flock of worries, or maybe dreams. The action revolves around a door that flits about the stage, at times a leaky barrier, and at others a portal to someplace else. Someplace better, or maybe someplace worse.
There’s some thrillingly neurotic movement here, a dissonance between the hero and his embodied thoughts which blossoms into synchronicity. The use of arms, in particular, emphasises the sense of struggle.
The piece concludes on the far side of that looming door, a comic pastiche of the Ballet Black green room. In a meta-development, Thomas now takes advice from his peers to take life ‘two minutes at a time’, dons a sparkling jacket and leads out a razzamatazz-laden jazz number to close the show. It’s a fun ending if nothing to stretch the assembled talents on stage.
The score by November and Alex Wilson satisfactorily tracks the nervy start into all-out pizzazz, and if the piece spends a great deal of time gazing into its navel, it has big finish sensibilities. It’s also brave to so extravagantly rehabilitate jazz hands live on stage.
Overall, HEROES makes an enjoyable night at the theatre, and if the ‘first half’ is stronger than the second, the company is never less than impressive.