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Nymphs, shepherds and passing deities have been food for narrative ballet since the 17th century. But for Kim Brandstrup, classical mythology is more of a touchstone than a template, supplying the starting point for complex and mysterious relationships.
Metamorphoses is a short but supersaturated double bill of works inspired by the Minotaur myth and the story of Cupid and Psyche. Both pieces were commissioned by Deborah Warner as part of her two-year stint as artistic director of Bath’s tiny 126-seat Ustinov Studio. Brandstrup is untroubled by the limited performance space: “I find the proximity strangely liberating,” said the Danish choreographer and filmmaker when I spoke to him last month. He likened the short sightlines to the intimacy of the camera: “ . . . their faces, their hands, the sense of touch. In an opera house you’ve got to reach the top of the gallery but in this room you are so close that you need much less performative power and it’s that closeness that I’m interested in.”
Brandstrup and the Ustinov certainly have no difficulty attracting high-profile artists. Metamorphoses features the Royal Ballet’s Kristen McNally and Matthew Ball, former Royal and English National ballerina Alina Cojocaru and contemporary dance and hip-hop virtuoso Tommy Franzen.
Minotaur, originally paired with Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra when it premiered in 2022, is revived with Ball as the faithless Perseus and McNally as the sorrowing Ariadne, half sister to the bull. Ball made a suitably surly and manipulative anti-hero and McNally gave an affecting performance as the conflicted woman at the story’s heart, but the ears and the tail must go to Franzen’s Dionysus. Brandstrup’s writing exploits the full range of his star’s extraordinary gifts (and every inch of available space). Franzen makes his first appearance perched at the very top of the craggy black set then scuttles, batlike, between the hidden handholds, his bare chest aglow in Jean Kalman’s honeyed moonbeams, abs shimmering like an ivory eiderdown.
In the original Cupid and Psyche myth, Venus, jealous of the nymph’s beauty, instructs Cupid to seduce her in total darkness. Brandstrup subverts the usual dynamic so that it is Cupid the man-child who is reluctant to see or be seen, unwilling to commit to a completely open relationship.
When we first see the brooding Ball he is lit chiaroscuro, like a lost Caravaggio. In the first exploratory exchange he teases his Psyche, blowing in her ear or paddling his fingers and toes in a stray shaft of light. The duets gain pace and soon the tiny Cojocaru is flying through the darkness in a succession of thrilling overhead lifts to a beguiling playlist of Bach, Arvo Pärt and others.
Ball, schooled by Manon and Mayerling, powers through every challenge, raising her with barely a plié and holding her aloft with unhurried ease so that she seems quite at home in the air. It’s a virtuoso display of partnering but the unfamiliar scale of this private dance renders the familiar tricks unsettling, even voyeuristic: we see them sweat, we hear them breathe and become strangely complicit in this modern myth.
★★★★★
To February 10, theatreroyal.org.uk
