English National Ballet
English National Ballet’s new venture, Synergy, brought together embryonic choreographers from within the company, graduate composers from the Royal College of Music, and designers from the Royal College of Art. The experiment proved a resounding success when the company performed it at the Britten Theater of the Royal College of Music in London in September.
According to the program notes, Les Emotions, by ENB first artist Van Le Ngoc, was inspired by the life of trees, their reactions to the elements, “solitude, sadness, love and joy.” In performance, I was unable to discern any resemblance to these imagined arboreal emotions and preferred to consider his suite of dances for three couples as pure dance, deftly arranged, lyrical and smoothly attuned to the music. If the work lacked an original choreographic signature, it still was impressive in the way each sequence passed fluently into the next in a succession of stylish ensembles.
The second ballet, Enlightened, by first artist Maria Ribo Pares, was also burdened by clotted program notes about various forms of love and desire. In effect, its six movement sections revealed a highly personal choreographic idiom.
Also using three couples, Pares kept her dancers in close proximity. They entwined with sharp contiguities, hands and feet thrust out at angles, arms crossed above heads, dancers back to back and back on back. She is a choreographer with something individual to say and an individual way of saying it.
Certainly, there were moments of confrontation, of romantic rapport, of attraction and rejection, but the emotions were subsumed by the sheer inventive movement, owing nothing to any established choreographer.
Because Thomas Edur is the company’s premier danseur, a superb classicist with Russian training, it was not surprising that his ballet, Anima, representing “body, mind, soul and psyche,” utilized the classical vocabulary in its purest form. Even so, the piece was infused with tremendous sensuality, with two extended pas de quatre for three men and a woman at its core. In each sequence, the woman was the provocative, erotic center of the group, manipulated, lifted and thrown from man to man with acrobatic daring. This was an essay in classical virtuosity spiced with the sexual liberation of the 21st century. Exciting and enthralling.
The final work, In The Beginning, by principal San Yet Chang, aspired to represent the elements fire, earth, air and water. Chang was well served by his nine dancers (as were all the choreographers), but his handling of the subject was disappointingly mundane. It failed to differentiate sufficiently between the elements, and there was little inventiveness in the choreography.
New works are the lifeblood of every dance company, and with Synergy it is evident that ENB is investing in the future.
Edward Thorpe writes for five affiliated London newspapers.
