© Dee Conway 'Perpetuum Mobile' reviews 'Pas de Quatre' reviews 'Variations for Four' reviews 'Who Cares' reviews Glurdjidze in reviews Gruzdyev in reviews recent ENB reviews more Ian Palmer reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

In Christopher Hampson’s Perpetuum Mobile (almost nine years old and deserving to be seen much more often) we see an intelligent and musical response to Bach’s Violin Concerto, BWV 1042 – ever-inventive choreographic motifs, quick, bright steps with an Ashtonian flavour (imagine Ashton served with paprika) and a beautiful pas de deux, (set to the Adagio movement and here most elegantly danced by Fabian Reimar and Fernanda Oliveira) in which the curves of the ballerina’s body match the curves of the violin’s melody. Of course Kochetkova, my heroine, must be singled out for her effervescent manner and astutely musical phrasing, but all good dancers look great in good choreography and so all the cast, headed by Sarah Mcllroy and Yosvani Ramos, deserve praise.

Let us also praise Mr. Benjamin Lumley of his Majesty’s Theatre for Pas de Quatre, for he it was who brought together Taglioni, Cerito, Grisi and Grahn on one stage (and suffered Cerito and Grisi’s rivalry). Sir Anton Dolin, taking the surviving lithographs, recreated the bones of Jules Perrot’s choreography and, save for Jelko Yuresha’s glitzy, spangly, utterly kitsch back-drop which seems to set the work on the far side of the moon, this is what we now see. Elena Glurdjidze (whom I love, I will not deny it) radiates theatrical divinity as Taglioni, seeming to listen and then reply to Pugni’s beautiful score, never anticipating it and always singing through it. Occasionally Richmond’s small stage made for slight difficulties in ensemble movement, but more so in Dolin’s Variations for Four, which calls for machismo and bravura dancing, and an appropriately large stage. Dmitri Gruzdyev’s excellent and boundless leap feels restricted here and it was to that champagne cork of a dancer, Yat-Sen Chang (who reminds me of Tetsuya Kumakawa) that the greatest plaudits fell. I could do without Marguerite Keogh’s “End-of-the-Pier Barrel Organ” music (and this strange moon setting), but the piece works as a virtuoso display of tremendous male dancers, with which ENB is currently blessed.
 

And there they are again, in Central Park, dancing away to George Gershwin’s foot-tapping tunes – Andre Portasio, Daniel Jones, Van le Ngoc, blitzing the stage with their dance, and seeming to say Who Cares?, which is of course the title of Balanchine’s work. But anyone who has heard Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin’s songs on Norman Granz’s wonderful American Songbook series will know that there is more to this music than meets the eye (or the ear) and thus Balanchine offers New York Gershwin with an Apollonian Classicism – Arionel Vargas dancing with his three muses, Bengona Cao, Elisa Celis, Simone Clarke, all possessed of Balanchinean grace. If I have one criticism it is that Vargas, (brilliant partner though he is), did not have the sassy, Fred Astaire nonchalance which I feel the role requires, but with sing-along tunes and foot-it-featly dancing from a sparkling ensemble, as the saying goes – Who Cares?