As One/Rushes - Fragments of A Lost Story/Infra - The Royal Ballet 01/03/2010

This was an unexpectedly good night. Three very modern works, including a debut for young choreographer Jonathan Watkins, with a strong cast of principals. I am writing this too long after the performance to write a fully detailed review, but I'll get down the general gist of things.

Watkins's As One opened the programme, and I was surprised at how coherent and compelling I found this new work. The choreography manages extremely effectively to portray both individuality and uniformity, loneliness and unity as it moves through a series of dances based on everyday life; channel surfing, a house party, school...In 'channel surfing' Laura Morera and Edward Watson dance almost entirely separately, seldom making body contact, and yet there is communication, a give-and-take in the choreography that makes it quite obvious that while these are two characters with individual struggles they are also united. In the 'house party' we see each of the dancers breaking out in individual sequences of steps. Interestingly, to begin with, my take on 'As One' was that we could strive to be individual but really we were just part of the mass, that even when we feel lonely and isolated and on the edge we are really on the uniform conveyor belt through life, as is danced through two solos including a flashingly brilliant, yet repetitive solo for Stephen McCrae. However, the final scenes create a sense of joy in the togetherness of our individuality, the final frieze showing the dynamic individuality of all the dancers meshing together to form one living breathing mass of united dancers! It was a delight, choreographically intriguing and creative. I didn't need to read the program to understand and get involved with this work, something deliciously unusual for the contemporary works that the Royal tend to perform. Go see. I hope they revive it in a couple of years!

Rushes, based on Doestoevsky's 'The Idiot' and danced to music by Prokofiev, however failed to grab me. Choreographically it felt like a poor Macmillan imitation, the set is intrusive, serving only to shut the audience out (although I think this may actually be the desired effect), and while Laura Morera gave a strong performance, and danced well with Carlos Acostas, there is little to get your teeth into here. My  sandwich filling hypothesis holdds true again it seems. So moving on...

Wayne McGregor's Infra was fortunately a return to the standard of the beginning of the evening. While I do find McGregor almost too abstract, his choreography generates a compelling tension between the dancers, whether there be two or twelve of them on stage. He has a very distinctive choreographic style, that's for sure, but I am dubious how many more similar ballets he can churn out before we tire of them. Strong performances from Ed Watson, and Eric Underwood (pictured).

A strong night for the Royal Ballet, which, for me at least, was all about As One.