A pandemic-era corollary to “The show must go on!” is “The show’s reviewer must arrive 15 minutes before curtain.” Why? Because at two minutes, the drill becomes: navigate getting side-swiped by an off-schedule conductor and his pre-teen daughter; swish through a lobby teeming with rain-splattered canons of French-speaking adolescent tourists; slink past the comfortably if truculent already-seated, squish into a seat while peeling off soggy foulies and digging into a trove of regulation review paraphernalia to extract a surgical mask, pen and paper, and finally, scan the waterfront for one’s car-parking companion, by now in Standing Room, held hostage to the no-late-seating rule. If the medium were the message, the curtain would have risen on Jiri Kylian’s “Cathedrale Engloutie.”
This evening, hale and hardy ballet devotees were handsomely rewarded for their fortitude with Cool Britannia, one of the best-curated, presented, and danced programs in memory. It’s safe to predict that you’ll end up hating yourself if you don’t reserve your seats toute suite!
Chroma, when it debuted in 2011 on this same stage, brought with it, placement, lighting, and color choices for the flats that turned them into blank canvasses. I had interviewed Sir Wayne McGregor just a few days before the Chroma performance. I found fascinating the description of the workshops he was putting together for dancers to experiment with approaches to shaping movement.
This season, Chroma read spectacularly. Thanks to set designer John Pawson and lighting designer Lucy Carter, it remains a humble palette bearing windblown pastel gradients of gentle sandy, muddy, or chalky naturalist hues. It was McGregor’s shapes that shone, the dancers rendering them with faithful allegiance and an eloquence issuing from the body’s confident and sensual dialogue with the Joby Talbot and Jack White III score.
The Wheeldon work, now free of its so-last-year costumes, showed just how the young choreographer had left irrefutable evidence of his growth as an artist even when he was so very young. Back then, with our eyes fixed on the verdigris and gilded tassels, we did not notice. For this run, the company commissioned Zac Posen to design new costumes. He sought to capture the mutations of color in the skies over San Francisco. He built skirts and tunics with a drape that could fall into step with the shapes and lines of the pas de deux and ensemble work.
From where I was seated, something more appealing than the sky concept caught my eye. From three or four inches above the hem, continuing down to it, the darkest part of the chromatic registered in earthy beet red or yam ombre-gold. The eye took in the naturally warm texture, and the body line extending beyond to the dancers’ feet. And the choreography? This time, we noticed. It went from lush to sophisticated to inventive, to heart-rending. The dancers were in for a penny, in for a pound. Sasha De Sola and Harrison James go wide in a ¾ time box step with Latin juju and finish with a proper waltz; Jennifer Stahl and Ruben Citores Nieto effect a brainy negotiation of a push-pull contretemps; and Frances Chung and Joe Walsh offer up perfectly paced adagio, arms and legs played like harp strings. Luca Ferrò lifts Thamires Chuvas as if she were a stylus and brings her low as if dipping her into an inkwell. The next male partner in a couple completes a séconde by bringing his working leg around as if drawing a circle with a compass. The Golden Hour is transformative: the costumes transform the focus; the focus transforms the movement; the movement adduces evidence that Wheeldon leaned into evocative storytelling many years before we saw it on Broadway in “An American in Paris.”
My London visits have never coincided with performances of the works of Akram Khan. He and Sylvie Guillem brought stunning interplay to CalPerformances in 2007, but in the intervening years, he has made a Giselle recontextualized by the shift in demography that war and the faultlines of economic collapse have wrought. In “Dust,” this evening’s final work, his ruminations on war go in on what in Spanish they call rumbo or transcurso, (in English, the “course”) of a gathering storm, peopled with the “manos brutas” [rough hands] that do the dirty work for the “manos finas” [fine hands] that issue the orders.
As a rolling mass of humans emerges from a darkened stage, with only eyes and partial views of heads and shoulders visible, it picks up the flotsam and jetsam that war aggregates. The war that Khan brings into focus is “the war to end all wars,” and the historical shank of the piece is women who participate for the first time in the manufacture of ordinance that will kill their fathers, husbands, and sons, against the agony of wartime social chaos. A voice sings out tinnily, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” and for those whose class does not profit from the spoils of war, and only stands to lose livelihoods or lives, that is the only explanation that makes sense, even though it makes no sense, no sense at all.
Toba Singer
