The advantages of a programme titled only ‘Mixed Bill’ are these: first, the audience may not have preconceptions or expectations, so a production may feel freed from the pressure of needing to live up to them; second, a company can concentrate of presenting exciting snippets without having to ruminate and wrestle over the details of narrative or coherence within an evening’s performance; and third, you can pretty much guarantee that there’ll be something in there to please everyone. <P>Certainly, PNB’s programme as presented on Friday night was broadranging in terms of the styles of work presented and the atmosphere sought to be created. The order of the programme had undergone a re-jigging from the beginning of the week, so the classical and traditional pieces, Balanchine’s Divertimento # 15 and the Pas de Trois from Petipa’s La Corsaire, started the evening chronologically, to be followed by Nacho Duato’s Jardi Tancat and Peter Martins’ Fearful Symmetries. The diversity of the programme and of the choreographic styles was a challenge for the company, but they convincingly managed to stay on top of each the pieces. <P>Balanchine is cheeky and quick-witted, and the piece, true to his title, cannot fail to divert an audience. The geometry of the spacing, the witty dialogue between different dancers’ simultaneous but opposing movement, and the constant shifting and interweaving of new numbers and patternings of bodies on the stage, makes for an eye-catching half hour. The dancers were well regimented, so the overall clarity and precision of movement was impressive, and the sharp phrasing, complex footwork and neat allegro, especially from the men, emphasised. <P>The excerpt from Petipa’s La Corsaire reminded us that at its historical root, ballet served as an opportunity for spectacle. The Pas de Trois aimed to wow the audience with classic virtuoso performance. So there was no bandying around with storyline, characterisation or motivation here, just a cut to the chase: powerful, macho grand allegro from the Arabian Nights-garbed men duelling for the attention of the thirty-two double fouetté-ing Indian princess heroine. Admittedly, there is little opportunity for interesting or profound relationships to develop within an excerpt of this length, so the focus was very much on the technique of the dancers. Again, the company ballet masters and mistresses have these dancers spotlessly in control; the three dancers had an impressive clarity and tightness to their movement.<P>The company followed with the two modern pieces, Jardi Tancat and Fearless Symmetries, which represented a stylist turnaround to the evening. Yet, the focus of the work somehow remained the same. PNB is obviously primarily a ballet company and both pieces were made for dancers trained as ballet technicians. Within this context, ‘contemporary’ pieces only work by subverting an already rigorous and defined vocabulary of classical ballet, which immediately limits the range of the body’s potential available to be played with in movement by the choreographer. <P>The meaning of Jardi Tancat rests somewhere between the haunting Spanish wails of Maria Mar Bonet whose music forms a basis to the piece, the desolate and irregular wooden stakes which surround and define the space of the stage, and the breathy, expanded flow of the choreography for the three male and three female dancers. Meaning is frequently ambiguous, often inarticulable and usually communicated on a non-cerebral level. So, when the dancers’ focus in a piece like this, with such potential to touch hearts, is so external, partly through choreographic definition, party through artistic decision, there is no space for the internal, emotional life of a dancing character to come alive and move an audience. Like the piece before it and the piece after it, which saw the dancers in a combination of reds, pinks and oranges whirring round the stage like humbugs shaken up in a jar, physical spectacle is prioritised over emotional credibility. <P><BR>PNB have a lightness and a sharpness to all their work that is a great credit,<BR>yet in this programme, without a pervasive sense of a more human empathy,<BR>I found it hard to relate to the work on anything more profound than a visual<BR>level.<P><P>------------------<BR>lootie bibby
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