© John Ross 'Chroma' reviews 'DGV' reviews RB 'Four Temperaments' reviews 'Four Temperaments' reviews recent RB reviews more Bruce Marriott reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months) Gallery of Photographs

Presswise there had been a lot of buzz about the use of White Stripes music in the bill's opening piece by the very un-ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor. But White Stipes fans were thoroughly wrong-footed by Chroma which is better seen as an orchestral work of Joby Talbot in which 3 of the 7 sections are based on the Stripes gritty Detroit tunes. Talbot has produced a terrific jazzy, brassy, chord-thumping score for McGregor to turn the audience's ballet world inside out. Chroma's cast of ten features many principals and all, along with the new and younger dancers, have innate stage presence. McGregor is about speed, fluidity, sharpness and odd angles - it's not immediately harmonious but in these dancers' hands it's raised above the "I can do this with my body so I will" level. It's not all fast paced but even in the slower lyrical and formal sections my eyes still overload with the different movement, amplified as it is by the white box set and neutral unisex costumes. Thrilling stuff.

If McGregor seems like an alien dropped in to work in a very different way with a wonderful pack of individual dancers, Christopher Wheeldon looks like the choreographer who understands the company and has produced a majestic company piece in DGV - Dance a grande vitesse. Not old and not fuddy-duddy, it's based on a Michael Nyman score for one of the French TGV train inaugurations. Jean-Marc Puissant's metallic set looks as if the wake from a train (or plane) has ripped up the floor, and dancers step though the vortex to give us more travel metaphors. There are dashes of fun from a waving corps but it's never silly and it wears its intelligence lightly as Wheeldon continues to evolve his own loose form of classicism. Darcey Bussell and Gray Avis notably dance a fine pdd where she becomes a plane, serene and sure as it slowly streaks across all below. I also liked Edward Watson and Leanne Benjamin who seem to make a truly 'comfy' partnership and I hope we see them more together. Nyman ends with a thunderous round of pulse-raising drumming but Wheeldon pushes through, his dancers journey silently, drifting on for a while as they recede into the distance. Journeys never really stop, but cue thunderous applause for this one.
 

Between the two premiers Balanchine's 1946 epic The Four Temperaments makes a rare appearance with RB - in the repertoire 30 years but only being danced for the 12th time here. It still has a strange look and stood as a reminder that people have been doing new and thrilling things with dancers for years. Nanette Glushak and the ballet staff have made a wonderful job of rehearsing this and the corps girls looked particularly together in their groups of 4. It makes such a difference. Praise also to Allen Robertson for some insightful and spirited programme notes about a seminal Balanchine work. Of the dancing, it might have been said many times before but you can't avoid praising Bussell for being the arch-Balanchine high-kicking girl. But it was Edward Watson's Phlegmatic variation that seemed particularly charged and mysterious - the evening's a personal triumph as he appears in major roles in all 3 pieces. Eric Underwood, the new joiner from American Ballet Theatre (and before that Dance Theatre of Harlem) also impressed with natural, unshowy, authority in the two premiers and he surely can't stay as a first artists for long.

In short: Wonderful. The Royal needs to commission further nights like this and perhaps let the past take a little more care of itself.