One long moan of woe: Crystal Pite’s Light of Passage, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised imagery, it proposed two ways of interpreting the horrific footage of the refugee crisis of 2016: either as a matter of anonymous, voiceless masses, portrayed as a body of dancers moving across the stage like a skein of migrating swallows beyond reason or control; or as a ragtag of desperate, furious individuals with every dignity and possession taken from them – somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s daughter or son, fighting for survival – a plight conveyed in the impassioned dancing of Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally.

Five years on, Pite has returned to flesh out this fierce and powerful half-hour work with two further sections: one focused on the young, the other on the elderly, and a note of sentimentality has crept in. Six children (junior pupils of the Royal Ballet School) dressed in white, vulnerable and innocent, are supported, shielded and lifted by phalanxes of adults, but it is never clear what they are being protected from. An ageing couple are separated by death – so what’s new? – as other younger couples enact the idea of inter-dependence in brief duets. There are moments, indeed whole passages, of expressively sculpted beauty in this, but just not enough substance to make it more than weepy.

Yet the deeper problem for me is Pite’s choice of score – Gorecki’s ‘transcendent’ Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which is used as an atmospheric backdrop rather than something which charges the dance with energy or shape. Gorecki deals in orchestral sludge, and his dreary Symphony lacks any variety of colour or pulse. Throughout its hour-long duration, it exhales one sapless moan of woe and as it drones meanderingly on, Pite is obliged to drone on too, gradually losing her compass, running out of ideas and finishing up swirling in mere fug. But I should add that the lighting by Pite’s husband, Jay Gower Taylor, and Tom Visser is exquisite, and a corps of the Royal Ballet performs with almost religious dedication.

The most engaging item in Birmingham Royal Ballet’s autumn triple bill – it travels to Sadler’s Wells in November – is a revival of Jiri Kylian’s Forgotten Land. Set to Britten’s doom-laden Sinfonia da Requiem, composed in the fateful year of 1940, it’s a work of anguished tension on the edge of apocalypse, and BRB’s dancers come electrically alive as they negotiate the twists and turns of its wiry, urgent and emphatic choreography. Special praise is due to Céline Gittens and Tyrone Singleton, the most vividly distinctive of BRB’s rather lacklustre roster of principals.

The remainder of the programme doesn’t match up. With The Seventh Symphony, Uwe Scholz is on a losing wicket – you can’t take on what Wagner called ‘the apotheosis of the dance’, one of Beethoven’s supreme masterpieces, and hope to win. I was reminded of something Frederick Ashton said when asked why he always avoided music of the front rank: ‘I haven’t got the cheek to think that I can add anything to Mozart.’ All Scholz can deliver is a sunny and energetic mass classical workout that will displease nobody but doesn’t reach beyond bland visual accompaniment. Thomas Jung’s conducting, however, gave pleasure.

The novelty was Hotel, a collaboration between Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright, a partnership that produced Scottish Ballet’s amusing update of Coppélia at the Edinburgh Festival last summer. This new work is much slighter: a variety of guests check in at the foyer and the superficially obliging staff get up to tricks in a faintly surreal scenario that doesn’t deliver more than a sinister frisson. Video is extensively (and tiresomely) used to take the audience inside the rooms; what little the dancers are given to do is couched in an idiom derivative of Wayne MacGregor’s vocabulary. The whole thing is instantly forgettable.