‘Vigorous energy and sharp technique’
Ballet Black: Heroes
16th May 2024
Reviewer: Siobhan Murphy
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Last year, Ballet Black brought Pioneers to the Barbican, a double bill celebrating Adrienne Rich and Nina Simone. This year, it’s Heroes – two works: one new, one reconfigured – that look for the extraordinary in the everyday.
Sophie Laplane’s If at First takes on the idea of heroism. The cast members dart, duck and weave, grabbing Basquiat-style papier-mâché crowns from each other as Dans Dans’ heavy guitars chug. Dotted amid this running conceit are a series of vignettes that illustrate, we’re told, an act of bravery or a quiet struggle. A tender, playful duet ends when the woman collapses lifeless to the floor, leaving her partner leaning into emptiness, stumbling as the moves that he made before are no longer supported. A triumphal crown-sporting king, the centre of attention amid a blast of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, is suddenly abandoned. A woman trapped in an ever-shrinking box of light is led out and onwards by those around her.
The switchbacks and grinding gear changes in the soundtrack as we move between the ensemble crown-chasing to these close-up scenes are unnervingly jolting. And Laplane and her creative consultant, James Bonas, seem to have taken an elastic approach to the concept of heroism that teeters on rendering the word meaningless. But the cast – five of the nine new to Ballet Black in the past year – brings a bristling, vigorous energy and sharp technique to the fast-paced movement.
The Waiting Game, by Mthuthuzeli November, was created in 2020 and its first iteration was performed in 2021. It’s now been heavily reworked, and not always improved. Ebony Thomas is a man in the throes of an existential crisis. A voice-over gives us his anguished thoughts and a cacophonous chorus repeats a crushing list of mundane tasks in English and (for reasons that are not entirely clear) Portuguese. Thomas tussles frantically with the voice in his head (embodied by Isabela Coracy) and the figments of his imagination (the rest of the cast, flitting in and out of a moving portal).
Then the lights go up and we’re presented with a totally different scenario. The cast members are transformed into the Marvellous Monties, preparing backstage to put on a show – preening, applying lipstick, donning sequinned jackets. Thomas is now the star of the show who, mired in ennui, doesn’t want to take the stage. Things go full-on Crystal Pite as he and Taraja Hudson mime to a voice track, him despairing, her encouraging him out of his slump, before a tumbling, limb-knotting duet. Then the company launches into the Marvellous Monties show, a sparkly jazz cabaret number, with Thomas front and centre, pushing through his dejection.
Wrangling with the meaning of life in a short dance work is quite a tall order, and The Waiting Game, for all its splashes of absurdism, has a certain earnest weight that means it’s hard to feel an emotional connection to the piece. Again, though, the dancers excel, seamlessly negotiating the swerving transitions of November’s choreography.