Royal Opera House, London
Three of the Royal Ballet's most seminal choreographers combine in this current triple bill to offer three very contrasting perspectives on death and transfiguration.
Wayne McGregor's Limen (2009) is shaped profoundly by its decor, the light and video installation of Tatsuo Miyajima. Miyajima's preoccupation with time, his projected number sequences and flashing LED lights, are matched by dancing where the performers appear like playthings of speed, forced and frantic as they submit to McGregor's superhumanly detailed choreography. But the eerie, exquisite middle duet, framed in a redemptive mist of light, reverses both the pace and the perspective. Limen may be one of McGregor's most characteristically abstract ballets, yet it is also a moving evocation of mortality, and an affirmation of the power of the human imagination to inhabit its own, brief, visions of infinity.
In passionate contrast is Marguerite and Armand (1963), Ashton's one-act distillation of Dumas' novel. This was famously created for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, yet Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin reclaim the ballet as their own. Polunin has all the star quality and technical arrogance to withstand the Nureyev legend, yet his acting is also detailed, tender and surprisingly natural. As for Rojo, she is one of the great dramatic dancers of her generation. Joy seems to flood her body as she becomes molten in Polunin's arms: it drains away with shocking abruptness, when Marguerite knows the affair must end. Her stricken, frozen grief stabs not only at the heart of Armand's father, but at ours too.
Finally MacMillan's Requiem (1976) interprets the sublime Faur� score with images of grieving piet�, transcendent lifts, tableaux of benign acceptance bathed in white celestial light. Lauren Cuthbertson is outstanding; her ability to interpret dance and music as if encountering them, spontaneously, for the first time lifts the ballet's religious imagery to a place of extraordinarily affecting human emotion.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/10/royal-ballet-review
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