Exhilarating, frightening and hilarious: Made in Leeds – Three Short Ballets reviewed

Good, better, best was the satisfying trajectory of Northern Ballet’s terrific programme of three original short works, which moves south to the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House at the beginning of November. The company has a new director in the amiable Federico Bonelli, formerly a principal with the Royal Ballet, and he has several problems to address, not least the shortage of richly characterful dancers among the senior ranks. But this triple bill should boost everyone’s morale, and the audience at the Leeds Playhouse was enthralled.

First up was Wailers, Mthuthuzeli November’s elegiac return to the world of his childhood in a parched South African township. Bourréeing on pointe with bells round their ankles, a mother and grandmother preside benignly over a brood of boisterous children. Its sincerity verges on the mawkish, but the overall effect is not without charm.

Next came Stina Quagebeur’s Nostalgia, a harder-nosed venture into the knots of couples therapy. In snapshots, we are shown an emotionally battered heterosexual pair, mirrored by another similarly dressed pair representing either their younger selves, or what might have been or what is no more. Friends in green provide consolation and diversion, but there is no reconciliation; Abigail Prudames and Joseph Taylor, Northern Ballet’s front-runners at present, made the couple’s pain and uncertainties bitter and vivid.

But the sensation of the evening is Ma Vie by hip-hop choreographer Dickson Mbi. It’s a riff off the idea of Casanova, a figure presented more conventionally in another work in Northern Ballet’s current repertory. Here we see him thwarted in his high-minded pursuit of an ineffable beauty, unobtainable in a giant white panniered gown, and drawn into a daemonic ritual controlled by a grotesque priestly figure (the sexually ambiguous Jonadette Carpio). As Roger Goula’s maximalist music pounds repetitively like a belt-fed mortar, everyone on stage is drawn deeper into an orgiastic danse macabre. It’s exhilarating, frightening and hilarious: the dancers had a ball and I did too.

At the London Coliseum, an ad hoc company made up of Ukrainian dancers now sheltered in The Hague, presented Alexei Ratmansky’s new production of Giselle. Ratmansky is a most thoughtful scholar of the 19th-century classics, and he has made some persuasive alterations to a choreographic text that has become encrusted with additions and corruptions since the ballet’s première in 1841. Particularly helpful is his clarification of the exposure of Giselle’s seducer Albrecht and his final reunion with his fiancée Bathilde. I only wish that the sequence mimed by Giselle’s mother as she explains the curse of the Wilis had been less mechanically delivered.

Sets (and costumes) had been borrowed from Birmingham Royal Ballet. Traditional in style bordering on the ropey, they didn’t fit the Coliseum’s large stage and there was no escaping an air of make-do and mend. Nor was the dancing all that it might have been in happier circumstances: the first act seemed altogether under-rehearsed, thanks to some rather stiff and joyless work from the corps and a routine account of the ‘Peasant’ pas de deux. Things improved considerably in the second act, however, with Vladyslava Kovalenko leading the ghostly Wilis with authority, and excellent playing of Adam’s score by the orchestra of English National Opera under Viktor Oliynyk.

Interest inevitably focused on Alina Cojocaru, a Romanian who trained in Kyiv before she arrived at the Royal Ballet School. Now in her early forties, she has lost something of the winsome naivete that shone through her interpretation a decade ago and in the second act I felt something of her former ethereal will-o’the-wispiness had gone too. In its place comes more psychological nuance and a powerful sense of what it is to love, to be betrayed and to forgive.

Her Albrecht was Alexander Trusch, a Ukrainian based in Hamburg. He was most impressive, presenting the character as boyishly impetuous rather than a heartless bounder and dancing with beautifully clean élan and precision. He was strikingly good in the Nureyev gala at Drury Lane a couple of weeks ago too, so I hope we can see more of him soon.

It wasn’t the most polished Giselle I’ve ever experienced and I suspect Cojocaru was a tad below her best. But bookended by the British and the Ukrainian national anthems, and with Ukrainian flags defiantly brandished during the curtain calls, it was certainly a uniquely stirring one.