Encounters: Four Contemporary Ballets review

The versatility of the Royal Ballet and Opera’s dancers is fully worked with this set of short pieces, collected under the broad banner of “contemporary”. There’s wit, dazzle, spikiness and delicacy on display – it’s good to see the company pushing itself, even if the results don’t always land. 

American choreographer Kyle Abraham made The Weathering for the RBO in 2022. It’s built on the theme of loss – although you’d need to read the programme notes to know it – and a set of gradually proliferating lanterns is the centre point of Dan Scully’s beautiful lighting design. The mood is ruminative, elegiac and tender, even as a loose and hopeful energy sets groups of dancers into eddying whirls of flickering feet, flowing arms and spirited switchback jumps. Melissa Hamilton and Lukas Bjørneboe Brændsrød make an appealing lead couple, slow and gentle in their central duet. Elsewhere, a bit more crispness in the group movement might have helped to stop the lulling sense of drift that permeates the piece, which ambles companionably, but doesn’t really take you anywhere. 

Pam Tanowitz expands on her seven-minute Dispatch Duet (created for Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell in 2022) for the 30-minute Or Forevermore. I’m not convinced that it adds much to that couple’s bravura pairing to have more dancers flitting about in ironic athleisure wear and daringly coloured unitards before the duet proper is reprised. Classical posturing is undercut with what feels intended to be witty intervention – a flurry of pogoing bounces, for instance, or a series of pirouettes that conclude with slumped, loose-hanging arms. But somehow, it comes off as rather po-faced and dry. The original duet remains intriguing – a tantalising combination of caring and confrontational. Ted Hearne’s score is raucously discordant to the point of distraction, though. 

Continues…