Encounters: Four Contemporary Ballets
Royal Opera House
 

THESE four innovative contemporary ballets explore the human condition, in very different ways, through movement.

Choreographer Kyle Abraham, who founded AIM – a dance company with a mission to create work about black and queer history and culture – introduces the quartet of dances with The Weathering.

First staged in 2022, eleven dancers capture the joys and sorrows of love and loss to composer Ryan Lott’s moving score and Dan Scully’s golden-washed lighting, with paper lanterns dotting the stage.

There are jubilant moments in every leap and spring while the slower movements allow dancers to express a vulnerability and gentleness, which finishes with a yearning solo tribute to loneliness.

Two new ballets follow. The first is Pam Tanowitz’s playful Or Forevermore that turns convention on its head, where costume designers Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme have the troupe kitted out in colourful Star Trek-esque lycra outfits.

Protagonists Mayara Magri and Marcelino Sambe delight in their show of strength during high energy duets that are mixed with chorus lines of comic performance — fun being the modus operandi.

Matthew Ball, Amelia Townsend and Kristen McNally in Crystal Pite's The Statement [Pic: Tristram Kenton]

In the other new work, Joseph Toonga’s Dusk is at a crossroads where classical ballet and hip-hop meet. Full of elegance and impressive on pointes, the piece explores connections and sees the women lead the pas de deux to Marina Moore’s dreamlike score, which incorporates birdsong.

The finale, Crystal Pite’s The Statement, is a skilful piece of dance-theatre that could come straight out of Armando Iannucci’s comic satire series The Thick Of It.

Four dancers — Amelia Townsend, Kristen McNally, Joshua Junker and Matthew Ball — are in the midst of a PR catastrophe as this creative boardroom drama of physical theatre unfolds.

Each assume the role of a character in the crisis, mouthing Jonathon Young’s spoken-word voiceover while flexing to every conceivable contortion, often to amusing effect, to denote their reactions to what's being said.

The Statement is a morality play against the modern ills of corporatism and profiteering — with the text suggesting a topical indictment against complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

One character says: “For generations they’ve been fighting. All we did was use it. We used it as an opportunity — the attacks — for investment. For growth. We used it.”

A tremendously thought-provoking finale to a motley crew of dances.

Encounters runs at the Royal Opera House until November 16.