Exhilarating: English National Ballet triple bill, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

Headed for San Francisco, Tamara Rojo bows out of her directorship of English National Ballet with an exhilarating triple bill demonstrating her success in expanding the repertory and raising technical standards. If only the company could tour this class of work outside London.

The climax of the evening was a new version of The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek – his second stab at dramatising music so graphically vivid and violently aggressive that choreographers since Nijinsky have struggled to find imagery and movement to match its primal energy. Even Kenneth MacMillan and Pina Bausch didn’t quite hack it for me.

Ek has avoided the clichés: nobody stomps about plastered in scary face paint. I wonder if his scenario was inspired by Ari Aster’s elegant horror film Midsommar? A community in elegantly cut white kimonos and tunics have selected not a sacrificial virgin but a girl and a boy to mate. The girl’s parents seem anxious but fatalistic. Neither girl nor boy (Emily Suzuki and Fernando Carratala Coloma, both terrific) seem to know quite what is expected of them, negotiating their sexual congress joylessly. The totem is a simple upright pole – it is unclear what it symbolises or why the girl seizes it as a defensive weapon. The boy seems defeated by the onslaught of the community, the girl fights back – and there is a surprise at the climax.

Ek is one of those choreographers obsessed with certain movements – in his case, for example, a deep-bend lope. But he keeps shapes taut and outlines clean. He knows how to build tension: the action is driven forward forcefully and communicates legibly, if ambiguously. The company dances with fiercely drilled vigour and the orchestra provides an adequate account of Stravinsky’s immense score.

Two slighter pieces preceded it. William Forsythe’s Blake Works 1, set to seven eerie laid-back songs by James Blake, showcases Forsythe’s genius for motivating dancers to scramble the conventional ballet alphabet and test its limits. ENB’s ambitious men – most notably Rhys Antoni Yeomans and Carratala Coloma – meet the challenge with more stylish confidence than the women, who look a bit prim and tight. Stina Quagebeur’s Take Five Blues suffers from being programmed straight after: she’s working in the same territory as Forsythe, without his sophistication or experience. Which is unfair, because flanked otherwise, hers would seem a very agreeable entertainment: fluent, funky and fun, with a sportily combative edge too. A burgeoning talent, Quagebeur is one to watch.

There was much to enjoy in the one-night-only Men in Motion, a bran tub of classics, rarities and novelties curated by Ivan Putrov and focused on the male dancer – the only female in evidence being Fumi Kaneko, who partnered Luca Acri in a vain attempt to animate Fokine’s hopelessly dated Le Spectre de la Rose. To think that Nijinsky and Karsavina once made this genteel aquatint a wonder of the world! Another dud from the Diaghilev era was an extract from Nijinska’s Le Train bleu, its insouciant back flips and handstands executed rather gingerly by José Alves.

Much more rewarding were a techno-charged solo, choreographed and danced with electric panache by Jack Easton; Matteo Miccini’s bracingly sharp-edged deconstruction of a Chopin nocturne; two high-camp sketches devised by Arthur Pita and executed with sexy wit by Leo Dixon and Edward Watson; and, most of all, Christopher Wheeldon’s Us, a delicately modulated portrait of a tender but troubled love affair, sensitively embodied by Matthew Ball and Joseph Sissens. Putrov himself admirably performed Ashton’s quietly lyrical Dance of the Blessed Spirits – a miniature of understated balletic genius.