Luckily, this section is also the shortest – in that, at least, it honours its setting.Īt curtain down, house reacted as if we’d all just witnessed the parting of the Red Sea. The result, however professionally danced by all, feels uncomfortably like Act II of The Nutcracker – as Drosselmeyer whisks Clara and chum around the Kingdom of the Sweets – but with less magic and more togas.Ībout Purgatory – sorry again: “Purgatorio: Love” – which, from a dramatic point of view, feels like a complete throwing in of the towel, the less said the better. McGregor has also failed to solve the problem of what to do with Virgil (Dante’s physical and moral guide, here played by a doing-his-level-best Gary Avis) as he escorts Dante (Ed Watson, ditto) around or, for that matter, with Dante himself. (One of my companions, an experienced English teacher, well-versed in the original: “So that was Beatrice that Dante was just dancing with, right?” Me: “Actually, I think it was Satan.”) (Dean, despite her pedigree in video art, helps not at all with this.) However hard you concentrate, I defy you to identify the various sins – surely a gift to a choreographer – from the steps alone, and the same goes for many of the characters. Here, there is no sense of forward, still less downward, motion or momentum. But has his forensic research translated into a propulsive, emotion-grabbing, dramatically taut descent into the abyss? I don’t doubt for a second that McGregor has studied the original with great care. The other approach is to consider it as a theatrical “translation” of a wonder of world literature – and it is on this level that The Dante Project falls particularly short. (It’s a pity the latter are prissily contained in a rectangular screen, but then again, you shouldn’t have too much fun in Heaven, right?) And in the latter stages of Paradise – apologies again: “Paradiso: Poema Sacro” – score, steps, Lucy Carter’s gilt-edged lighting and video-artist Tacita Dean’s light show of mercurial concentric circles fuse beautifully. There are various passages in Hell – sorry: “Inferno: Pilgrim” – where that and McGregor’s lively ensemble passages combine to wash immersively over you. Heavenly bodies birmingham review full#An odyssey-in-music from the spine-chilling depths of hell to the transporting, hope-filled expanse of the cosmos (God’s?), and full of exciting rhythms, colours and textures, this is a creation of exactly the sort of intelligence, insight and sheer bravura you’d expect of him. The all-new score by Thomas Adès (also conducting on the night) is fantastic. In which case, you might have a decent evening – and one that does, in fairness, pass with surprising speed. One, often the more sensible, is to forget its source material entirely (in this case, Dante Alighieri’s early-14th-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy) and enjoy it entirely on its own terms. As ever, with any literary adaptation of any kind, there are two fundamental approaches to watching Wayne McGregor’s corporately titled The Dante Project, which the Royal Ballet finally premiered on Thursday at Covent Garden.
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