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Javier de Frutos and The Royal Ballet November 2001 London, Linbury Studio Theatre by Catherine Hale |
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Following Wayne McGregor earlier this year, Javier de Frutos is the latest choreographer with a contemporary dance background to be given access, by the Artists Development Initiative of the ROH, to the often-impervious world of classical ballet. . Suggestively-titled, The Misty Frontier promised “the electric atmosphere of a meeting between Tennessee Williams and George Balanchine which took place in 1945”. The influences were said to come from De Frutos’ unconscious and probably should have stayed there. Trying to decipher a plot to this portentous encounter led one up a blind alley, especially since the musical score was interspersed with a narrative on How to be a Ventriloquist. Still, the coterie of an audience at the Linbury Studio didn’t seem perturbed as they were happily beguiled by the Royal Ballet’s rising young talent displaying their extensions a la Mr B. This work was clearly a homage to the old master of modern ballet. Made for three couples, its highpoints were the kind of showcase pas de deux in which the ballerina, suspended on her pivotal pointe, enacts a gamut of feminine guiles. Sometimes she leans, bent-kneed and obliging, into her unassuming partner and at other times she archly flashes her fouettees at him, pausing only to frame herself coquettishly with his arms as they support her. The costumes, designed by De Frutos, followed Balanchine’s flirtation with practice clothes: plunge-necked black leotards graced with semi-opaque pleated skirts just long enough to make the tops of thighs disappear into infinity, while the men looked fetching in tight pants with bare legs, rather like pubescent gymnasts. The connection with Tennessee Williams was more elliptical. The clean-cut dalliance of the ballet was intermittently confronted – usually by Javier himself, clad contrastingly in workman’s vest - with nervous, brooding movements, possibly gesturing to smoky passions of the Deep South. But there was no apparent communication between these disparate styles, and no structural progression to the work. The soundtrack of banalities and tongue twisters in rich American drawl might have made interesting rhythms and modulations to the ballet genre. But De Frutos lacks the intimacy with the classical vocabulary that enabled Balanchine to subvert the form so deliciously and with such musical wit. For all their accomplishment and charm there was no verve between the dancers and the narrative, or indeed the other music by Bach and Daugherty. Only De Frutos’ own movement style, pelvic-centred and highly-strung, engaged with the oddly sensual undercurrents of the dialogue.
De Frutos’ first experiment with ballet succeeded in capturing the cool aura of a former master of the art. But he has not yet been able to inflect the classical form with his own movement repertoire and hint at a new direction for it.
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