Birmingham Royal Ballet: Luna review

After the fireworks of Black Sabbath – The Ballet last year, the final piece in Carlos Acosta’s trilogy of Birmingham ballets had a lot to live up to. The idea seemed good – a celebration of women connected with Birmingham. And making the work a showcase for five female choreographers seemed ambitious: that’s a lot of voices to bring together. Have they pulled it off? Frankly, no.

For a start, the concept has gone awry, with only one choreographer seeming to want to stick to the brief. Seeta Patel’s Learning to Dream Big is a nod to the Birmingham-based education activist and Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. Five girls in some sort of Enid Blyton boarding-school fantasy scenario are inspired by books to choose their futures. Patel is trained in the Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam, but there’s none of that here, just an at times painfully literal interpretation of their dreams. One of them wants to be a doctor? Play the theme to Casualty while she dashes about tending to patients (composer Kate Whitley provides the music for the whole evening, with varying results).

Elsewhere, it’s left to ‘the moon’ to do the heavy lifting as far as any unifying theme goes – each scene gets its own anodyne moon reference, whether in a quote or a video projection. The rest of Luna is a woolly amorphous blob of vague gesticulation towards a generalised notion of female strength.

The Dutch choreographer Wubkje Kuindersma’s pieces bookend the whole thing, roping in a solemn, rather hectoring children’s choir for both. The opening Terra, the programme grandly states, is about the cycles of life. Five couples flow and sway, imitating oceanic swells. The finale, Luna, piles everyone on stage for triumphal leaping and bounding in front of projected space-scapes.

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