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A beast that really is a beauty Beauty and the BeastBallet CymruPalace Theatre, Mansfield**** WELSH Ballet
(Ballet Cymru) is one of those prodigiously gifted young companies you
stumble across once in a decade. I have seen them perform Shakespeare (Hamlet,
Romeo and Juliet)
electrifyingly. A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and
The Tempest
stunningly. Closer to home, their Under
Milk Wood was as joyous as it was
moving. Choreographer Darius
James has staged other classic adaptations (like
Lady of the Lake,
Little Red Riding Hood)
with real insight, wonderful casts of beautiful, heart-rending young
executants; and with none of the kitsch
feel that could sometimes bedevil, say, the late Christopher Gable’s
Northern Ballet Theatre. On form, Welsh Ballet is not just glittering;
it’s pure gold. The Newport-based ensemble started out in 1986 as
Independent Ballet Wales, with the wonderful Yvonne Williams as general
manager and universal factotum, who made sure the comely lead youngsters
(usually eight in the squad) washed behind the ears, conjured up
glorious costumes from charity shop bits of cloth and with the odd
knitting needle, and was always there to welcome you front of house. Yvonne died just before Christmas, a huge loss.
Though not before seeing one of their most brilliant creations, a double
bill led off by Cold Rolling, an evocation (combining ‘a stark
industrial soundtrack, looped grainy video recordings and minimalist
choreography to evoke the mundane, dehumanising nature of the work’) of
the mechanical process for producing sheet steel, so crucial a part of
South Wales’s once flourishing industrial economy.
Like the works in Ebbw Vale and Port Talbot, This
company has fire in its belly. You can see from every aspect of its work
that the company will live up to her, and keep her infectious spirit
alive. In her last years it redoubled its award-winning
status, taking a Critics Circle National Dance Audience Award, then four
years ago it at last gained much-needed revenue status from the Arts
Council of Wales, and soon after a £139k grant from the Paul Hamlyn
Foundation. Two of its productions were nominated for Best Dance
Production by the Welsh Critics in 2013, and the same year it was
nominated Best Independent Dance Company nation all by the Critics
Circle. Darius James is the company’s co-founder and
principal choreographer. A natural teacher and inspirer, and till a few
years ago a riveting dancer, driven out by injury (ENB’s Thomas Edur,
seen by the Financial Times as ‘the finest classical dancer in
the country’, and who guested for Birmingham Royal Ballet, in a similar
situation ended up running Estonia’s National Ballet), James coaxes,
nurses, fashions his young charges – some are very young, 18-22 - into
dancers of real maturity. There is an all-round beauty of attitude which
translates visibly into a beauty in performance. And now they have launched Beauty and the
Beast, at the Palace Theatre, Mansfield, with a new tour lasting
till from May to July. Y Brydferth a’r Bwystfil, to give the
famous fable its Welsh title, lives up to IB’s previous efforts well.
James and his fellow-director Amy Doughty choreograph with their usual
affection for the story and for the performers, using each dancer’s
differing skills to best advantage. As a finely shaped, immensely
polished stagework Beauty is haunting, appealing, poignant, and
ultimately buoyant and life-enhancing. Those are things Welsh Ballet,
with its blossoming youth and flair, does better than anyone. Everything conspires. David Westcott’s music is
elegant, attractive, desirable. These dancers don’t need simplistic
rhythms to shape their bodies to, but they need mu
Points
You are quickly captivated by the
characterisation: Daniel Morrison as Beauty’s hopeful (but unsuccessful)
young lover; Andrea Batteggia as her brother; Robbie Moorcroft as his
chum. Each brings his own sparky personality to bear, so a kind of
village of characters emerges, almost as in Under Milk Wood.
Small duets evolve: two of the boys, then Beauty and one of them. And
then the caring father (Nicolas Capelle), almost as fondly possessive as
if he’s just carved a Pinocchio. His slow pirouette with his daughter is
absolutely gorgeous (although a few scenes later his invention and
delivery did marginally weaken). Despite the group’s intensive traditional
training, James and Doughty’s Ballet Cymru is not even mainly about
classical ballet. Balletic gyres are interspersed with almost normal,
naturalistic moves. It’s not as if you don’t get sequences on point, but
they come and go. You certainly get more formal dance than in Matthew
Bourne’s latest, but not as much as in, say, David Bintley’s BRB. And
it’s good to look at: Steve Denton’s costumes, early on a flurry of
yellows and reds, delight (the pushy sisters, a bit like Cinderella’s –
Krystal Lowe, Natalie Debono, Annette Antal - look good, fit well, and
enhance the show). Denton’s set focuses on highly atmospheric
back-projections and video usage, so that quickly the scene turns
crepuscular, thorns emerge (on set and in some snaky costumes) and we
are in the world of a sad, eerie palace. Side panels and pale statues
complete the slightly icy feel. Even without the dance, the poignancy of
the beast’s metamorphosed condition is evident. Denton gives us
loneliness, oppression, even deep distress. The sisters are now weird
maidens, part threat, part objects of wonder. We have entered another
planet. Chris Illingworth’s lighting – interlocking paths
of yellow and beige, orange and greeny-turqoise, not at all overegged or
overdeployed - adds a lot. It counts for something when Mandev Sokhi’s
Beast, in a subtle skeletal costume, makes his entrance. Beauty gets
entranced by him pretty quickly; perhaps a bit more might have been made
of the initial fear, horror, The ensuing ensemble sections are well dovetailed
to the music, though I felt just near the end of the first half it
momentarily became a little muddy in look – something that could yet be
sharpened. The final sequence, the music (and indeed the look) of the
dance almost Tchaikovskian, my notes tell me, was pure delight.
When Sokhi’s Beast crawls, he acquires an
elegance that his standing self – rather awkward on perhaps too
high-raised stilts, rearing like a horse; an echo, perhaps, of the Wolf
in BC/BW’s Little Red Riding Hood - lacks. In a way it’s
difficult for him to dance, just as swirling Hispanic skirts slightly
restrict those sisters at the start from revealing their true agility.
Snaky he might seem, like Adam’s serpent after the Fall, but he’s
fabulously elegant. Arnoux seems lost in adoration: it’s almost as if
she is trying single-handedly to charm him out of his alien skin. Quite
some relationship develops. The next ensemble, roughly a sextet, is much
better: focused, clever, finely executed. Westcott’s music takes on
‘rich and strange’ new consistencies. There’s a hint (probably
unconscious) of Tubular Bells. And a gentle carillon that falls
and rises, massively atmospheric. We progress to an enchanting (as
opposed to enchanted) recognition scene for Beauty’s put-upon father
rediscovering her. There is a freshness to everything, though at one
latish point I felt the music became not quite optimal for the danced
scene (rather than the dancers failing to match the music). Avenant (Morrison), the wannabe boyfriend, has
another go, in a rather well-danced sequence, attractively fluid and
fluent. But it is not to be. The Beast emerges as the real boy, the
monsters shed their attire, spells are undone, normality descends. A
folk violin is used rather effectively for the expressive last main
solo. The final ensemble arguably needs geeing up – not
so much qualitatively, but with an extra idea to give it specific
meaning. A bit more like the curtain calls, which were, as you’d expect
from this polished company, tip-top. For any small drawbacks, Beauty and the Beast
is a treat and joy. Inventive ballet at its best, fresh and original and
alive. Ballet Cymru’s new tour impends; this appearance at Mansfield was
early days for this cast. With a bit of tweaking, it will join the
pantheon of Welsh Ballet’s best.
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that is enabling. They get it. The score is minimalist in places, but
never tediously repetitive, always endlessly creative and imaginative.
Part way in, there’s a lovely recorded sequence for two cellos - or is
it one cellist exquisitely double-tracked? When the Beast takes the
stage, the aura shifts to the kind of instrumental clusters you might
find in a great modern composer such as Lutoslawski. That kind of detail
works wonders.
revulsion. But what is perhaps nicer is that she is so unfazed.
She stands up to him. She is not overruled. It fits with the character
Lydia Arnoux conjures. She is no shrinking violet.