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A stimulating Sunday afternoon at the old fireworks factory at Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London, where New Movement Collective were presenting Les Noces — The Departure, an imaginative response to Diaghilev’s enduring Ballets Russes masterpiece.
The original Les Noces, first danced in Paris in 1923, boasted a score by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska (sister of) and sets and costumes by Russian cubo-futurist Natalia Goncharova — Gesamtkunstwerk doesn’t begin to cover it. The piece, together with her 1924 Les Biches, was restaged by Nijinska herself during Frederick Ashton‘s directorship of the Royal Ballet in 1964 and was regularly revived, but it hasn’t been seen at the Royal Opera House since 2012. Programmers, like publishers, are normally slaves to the calendar, yet last year’s centenary came and went with scarcely a peep from Covent Garden. November’s one-night-only Insight evening felt like an afterthought but was at least filmed for posterity.
Last weekend’s 60-minute four-part show was presented in the round on a narrow platform (roughly five by 20 metres) erected in the handsome, flexible space of Woolwich Works. The seating, for around 500, was unallocated but should the piece ever be revived (fingers crossed), grab a table near the band.
Stravinsky’s Les Noces was the main event but was topped and tailed by three terrific new compositions. Appels, a percussive piece — rainsticks, kettledrums, bells — by French-Mexican new wave R&B artist Andrea Balency-Béarn was followed by Cage Letters, a piano setting of three of John Cage’s love letters to Merce Cunningham composed and played by the project’s music director Yshani Perinpanayagam and sung by baritone Ross Ramgobin.
The celebratory finale, Rhythmic Resurgence, featured the buzzy English National Ballet Youth Company throwing shapes to a beatbox reimagining of Les Noces by MC Zani performed by Jack Hobbs, who flooded the space with noises, sounds and sweet airs using just his microphone (and Josh Bobby’s first-class sound design).
Les Noces itself rightly formed the centrepiece, conducted by the versatile Perinpanayagam and strongly performed by four pianos (Julian Chan, Junyan Chen, Milda Daunoraite and Ekaterina Grabova), seven percussionists, four soloists and the chorus of Opera Holland Park.
The dancers for Les Noces began infiltrating the audience during the second section, wearing a range of loose tops and trousers, only taking to the floor when the Stravinsky began. When Les Noces was first mooted, Diaghilev commissioned multicoloured sets and costumes from Goncharova (who was fascinated by Russian folkloric art). Nijinska, though, found them too operatic, and the final version was starkly monochrome, like a sepia photograph. April Dalton’s designs for The Departure use a similarly restricted mood board of greige and off-white, with a washing line of discarded garments that carries echoes of the long, strangling plaits of Nijinska’s sacrificial bride.
The movement was co-devised by a thoroughbred contemporary troupe of nine dancers (mostly ex-Rambert). They huddled and whirled and formed plastic groupings to the rhythms but the dead weight of ritual was missing (as yet) and ultimately their doings were no match for the overwhelming power of Stravinsky’s score.
★★★★☆
