By Debra Craine
28th March 2022, The Times
★★★☆☆
This Ballet Black double bill was conceived in 2019, but like so many works made since then it has assumed an added significance in light of recent events. “Although the themes of both ballets were relevant when we began creating them in 2019, the pandemic and the latest iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement have made the themes we explore even more resonant,” says the artistic director Cassa Pancho, who founded the eight-strong troupe 20 years ago.
It’s certainly true that you can read an extra layer into these works by William Tuckett and Mthuthuzeli November. Tuckett, whose Then or Now opens the bill, was inspired by the activist poetry of Adrienne Rich, because he was “overwhelmed by her ability to call the reader to action” and by “her rejection of apathy, injustice and oppression”.
We begin with this sentiment in voiceover — “What kind of times are these?” (the opening poem from Rich’s 1990s collection Dark Fields of the Republic) — and it’s clear from the studied melancholy of Tuckett’s choreography for eight dancers that these are depressing times indeed, a mood enhanced by Biber’s Passacaglia for solo violin (arranged and recorded by Daniel Pioro). Tuckett chooses not to directly illustrate the poems, although their themes of love and war are clearly felt in the sculpted emotions of his gentle classical language. Yet the dance is also in competition with Rich’s poetry and sometimes the dancers, for all their conviction, find themselves playing second fiddle to the words.
Spoken text also features in the second piece, November’s entertaining The Waiting Game, which starts with the choreographer reciting the litany of chores that make up his daily life. It is inspired by Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd, but reads like the daydream of a man desperate to escape the humdrum of reality and the questions of existence that plague him. He is taunted by the promise of a closed door on stage that leads — where? To liberation and joy?
November’s choreography is agile but conflicted, in keeping with the character, while the other dancers form a kind of chorus line of angels and demons who emerge through the door to lead him in a jolly, sometimes sinister merry-go-round of juicy possibilities and energetic, thrusting moves. When he finally does make it through the door it’s party time all round as Etta James belts out Something’s Got a Hold on Me, but will it last? Can our dreams be so easily realised?