Yahoo Finance Are you ready to watch the undead dance? ENB takes flight into film
A Cuban sugar plum fairy, the undead, a Russian war epic, two women staring each other down in a boxing ring – you never know what’s coming next in English National Ballet’s digital season. The five latest films, wide-ranging in style and concept, average 15 minutes each, making them notably more substantial than most video shorts in the Covid era. It’s an attempt at meaningful choreography as well as visual flair. They will be performed on stage at some point, but for now the films are being released one per week.
Shot in ENB’s own studio, the works are more filmed dances than dance films but there’s still imaginative use of the space from the directors, who mostly come from commercials and pop videos. The most straightforward is the first, Stina Quagebeur’s Take Five Blues. With warmth and fun, the dancers bounce off violinist Nigel Kennedy’s unconventional recordings of Take Five and Bach’s double concerto. The combination of classical and jazz is reflected in the choreography’s uncomplicatedly attractive angles; it has the mood of improvisation and the precision of a technique class. There’s energy in Shaun James Grant’s direction but it always remains respectful of the choreography.
Another film completely in service to the choreographer is Russell Maliphant’s Echoes (available 14 December), directed by Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. It looks much like Maliphant’s recent work for his own company: flickering projections by designer Panagiotis Tomaras, six dancers on meditative, slow corkscrewing trajectories, washed over by waves of light and shadow. For Maliphant this is no departure but if you’re coming from classical ballet, it’s a significant shift to dance driven by energy, texture and light.
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Yuri Possokhov’s first UK work, Senseless Kindness (available 30 November), shows his talent for classical choreographic prose, in lilting, playful and romantic phrases. The piece is based on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, an epic second world war novel impossible to distil into a 13-minute dance. Thomas James’s film-making can distract from the flow of the dance but it’s beautiful to look at, making use of every shade and texture in its black and white palette.
James also directs Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Laid in Earth (available 7 December), the film that takes us farthest from the dance studio and into a goth-tastic set of skulls, dusty earth and a passage between the realms of the living and the dead. It’s got a glorious Precious Adams emerging from the underworld, her movement in scooping curves like licking the last morsels from the bowl. And we hear Dido’s Lament, the most devastating of deathbed songs, as Erina Takahashi and James Streeter’s bodies entwine like vines.
The cheery season finale is Arielle Smith’s Jolly Folly (directed by Amy Becker-Burnett, available 21 December). Smith, 24, is clearly one to watch. She has worked with Matthew Bourne and you can see how the two would be in tune: she offers an easy-watching experience, harking back to vintage Hollywood, but always with a twist. The music is classical tunes (a Strauss waltz, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker) transformed with Cuban rhythms, and Smith brings that same sense of a clever, witty warping of the classics from the distorted silhouettes of her costumes to her quirky, silent-movie-inspired moves.
As a whole, the season is a richly unpredictable offering, stretching the dancers into new terrain – a good example of creativity coming out of difficult times.
English National Ballet: Digital Season is available to rent online.
