Carlos Cortes 'Por Vos Muero' reviews 'Without Words' reviews 'Rassemblement' reviews recent Nacional de Danza reviews

Duato’s work has a distinctive musicality. Dancers need time to acquire the style. Because his ballets are, in his words, “made to measure”, they are prone to loss of nuance when other companies perform them. In February and March the Royal Ballet’s ‘Enduring Images’ and ‘Cross Cultures’ programmes included Por Vos Muero. It was interesting therefore to compare the London version with that danced by CND, for which it was made.

The stage in Geneva was compact, as are many of the stages on which CND performs, when it tours in Spain. Far from being a drawback, the effect was to focus the work and to heighten the interaction of the performers. On Duato’s own dancers the work was much more legible than it was on the Royal Ballet. There was joy, wit and abandon in CND’s performance. In contrast the Royal Ballet’s reading seemed almost tense.

Por Vos Muero is a ‘time travelling’ ballet whose choreography and design brings a contemporary gloss to the accompanying secular and sacred Spanish music of the 16th and 17th centuries. The music is interleafed with spoken fragments of verse culminating in the Por Vos Muero sonnet from the poet Garcilaso de la Vega. While the choreography is modern, it quotes Spanish folk dance together with gestures from period paintings and sculptures. The ballet is dimly lit. This is a very deliberate part of Duato’s aesthetic. His figures are shadowy, as in an unrestored oil painting, and are brought fleetingly to life as they emerge from the shadows of a cloister.

Duato's 'Por Vos Muero'
Photographer Carlos Cortes

This is the third time I’ve seen Por Vos Muero. In London it seemed oddly layered, and the costumes fussy and intrusive. In Geneva the poetics of the work were vivid. The choreography had a life, simplicity and a gaiety that had somehow eluded the Royal Ballet. The court dance and the women’s trio were particularly striking. Even the section for the men in burgundy capes swinging thuribles seemed gesturally apt. The dancers gave the impression of real familiarity with the Catholic service of Benediction, whereas their counterparts at the Royal Ballet looked self-conscious and uncomfortable. The final frieze was intensely moving. A woman in period costume dances briefly with a modern figure before returning to the shadows and to the embrace of a partner from her own period as the lights go down and the curtain falls. The audience’s enthusiasm was loud; it contrasted with the restrained reception at Covent Garden.

While Ross Stretton’s instinct to show Duato’s work is not wrong, Por Vos Muero may not have been the right acquisition for the Royal Ballet, because its signature is so specifically CND’s. More appropriate might have been another work from the Geneva programme, Duato’s Without Words. Like Remansos this work was made for American Ballet Theater. It is danced to six Schubert songs scored, not for voice, but for piano and cello, hence the title. The cast are dressed in fleshed coloured leotards and shorts (explicit display of the body seems to be Duato’s code for modernity). The ballet itself is a sequence of trios and duets, by turns romantic, sexual, bitter and elegiac. Black and white photographs of the dancers, projected at the back, offer cues to the changing atmospherics. Without Words is an exercise in ballet modernism. While its style is less distinctive than that of Por Vos Muero, it has a rich vocabulary and would suit a repertory company such as the Royal Ballet, as Remansos did, the first piece that Duato created for ABT.

Duato's 'Rassemblement'
Photographer Guillermo Mendo

The third work, Rassemblement, one of Duato’s earlier pieces, was made for the Cullberg Ballet in 1990 and was in some ways reminiscent of Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances (Duato was for a time a student at the Rambert School, and CND is of similar size to Rambert). The ballet, which draws its material from the music and dances of Haiti and its voodoo traditions, was the least satisfying of the Geneva programme. There are choreographic longeurs with occasional flashes of real invention. It is politically correct and very much a young man’s statement.

Rassemblement’s warm reception in Geneva may illustrate a wider difference in sensibility between continental and British audiences. The world of philosophy may offer a useful parallel. Where continental philosophers explore large over-arcing ideas, their British counterparts have a preference for linguistic analysis and exacting, if earth-bound, logic. The parallel in dance may be a British fascination with academic grammar and a fundamental concern with steps. If true, this might explain why choreographers such as Forsythe have found an acceptance here, while several other Europeans, notably Kylian and Bejart, have been greeted with scepticism. Many see traces of Kylian in Duato – but Duato has a specific language of his own and he does care particularly about steps. That care is most explicit when his own dancers perform his work.

Duato's 'Rassemblement'
Photographer Guillermo Mendo

Duato is sceptical about dance in the UK, regarding it as having fallen behind. In a 1997 interview he said that not only had there been no evolution here in classical dance, but that it was “aside and isolated on another road”. Instead of being mesmerised by such figures as Ashton, he argued, companies and audiences in Britain should be exposed to the contemporary European choreographers.

He has a point of course. But there is a wider lesson for dance in Britain from Duato’s direction of his own company. His predecessor at CND was Maya Plisetskaya, accused by her critics of having tried to impose an artistic model from without, which was wrong for Spain. Duato was determined to create a strong contemporary Spanish identity for the company and has done so. The implication for the Royal Ballet is that it will best grow creatively by asserting its own distinctive qualities. A viable future must have woven into it the DNA of the Royal Ballet’s own heritage.

Perhaps it’s a forlorn thought, but the best Duato work for the Royal Ballet might be a special commission, along the lines of those he has done for ABT, giving creator and company alike an opportunity for dialogue. The problem about buying works “off the peg” is that they inevitably look better on those companies for which they were first made. Just how much better, London audiences will be able to see for themselves, when Compania Nacional de Danza comes to Sadler’s Wells in the autumn.