by Leigh Witchel
Could there be a more brainy, or tougher, challenge than to try and dance the “Divine Comedy?” Dante’s poem is not inherently theatrical: like the “Decameron” or the “Canterbury Tales,” it’s a collection of narratives in a framework. Without the stories inside the story, Dante meets people, hears their stories and comments or reacts.
Wayne McGregor made “Inferno: Pilgrim” for The Royal Ballet in 2019. Delayed by the pandemic, the other two sections, “Purgatorio: Love” and “Paradiso: Poema Sacro,” finally were created. Edward Watson, now 45, held on to retire in the role.
McGregor and his team have always talked a great game. What they delivered was a full evening of visual art, music and movement. That’s ambitious, and impressive, but not the same as delivering a cogent theater piece. There were plenty of words spilled in the program book, though no flow charts. If you want to keep up with William Forsythe for pretentious program notes you’re going to need a flow chart or two. But alas, most of the conceptualizing didn’t make it across the footlights.
The designs, by Tacita Dean, carried their weight. The backdrop for “Inferno” was a black and white painting of a mountain range, inverted. It was the first of several things that recalled treatments of another great story of the underworld: Orpheus. The mountains and a portal to the upper world were distant kin of ideas Isamu Noguchi put into his designs for Balanchine’s “Orpheus” and gave a powerful sense of being in a realm below the terrestrial.
The work, as in the “Divine Comedy,” was divided into three sections, and “Inferno” was the busiest. We began in Dante’s dark wood, and it was also a smoky one. Watson, as Dante, dressed in a simple blue outfit that resembled a long tunic, began as Dante described, wandering in that dark forest to the music’s angry chords. Virgil, Gary Avis, appeared dressed in yellow, and started him on his journey.
After meeting couples spinning in dark unitards, (The Selfish), they came upon the Ferryman, which was a duet danced by Marcelino Sambé and Yasmine Naghdi. The dancing mostly relied on ballet for vocabulary and placement, but with the occasional loose McGregor axis. Particularly in partnering, McGregor had a limited range of expression: Sambé picked Naghdi up in simple carry lifts, spun her round, or upside down, and put her down.
Dante and Virgil joined seven other men beginning with neat tendus. Eventually they formed three trios. It made sense that these would be the souls of poets in limbo, but without really studying the program beforehand, there’s very little you understand just by watching. There’s enough differentiation to know it’s someone else, and maybe who. “Oh, that’s Paolo and Francesca. Oh, those are the suicides.” But you don’t learn about them or feel anything.
Francesca (appropriately enough, danced by Francesca Hayward) and Paolo (Matthew Ball) appeared. They were more lively, and Ball did go in for the suspicion of a kiss, but the vocabulary was much the same grab, haul and spin movement as before. At least on first viewing, your understanding of these people doesn’t go much beyond figuring out who is who. Hayward and Ball shadowed one another in attitude before he carried her off in silence.
Calvin Richardson played Ulysses, another grimacing male apparition with movements both cat- and snake-like. In some ways it recalled Balanchine’s troubled protagonists in “The Four Temperaments.” Like the man in Melancholic, Richardson was accosted and tossed by the corps; and like Phlegmatic, he picked up his foot by the heel the same way, but wound up on the ground.
Besides the designs, another aspect of the production giving us the right cues was Thomas Adès’ score, a co-commission with the Los Angeles Symphony: It was rhythmic more than tuneful, but also it let us know where we were quickly so we could go beyond that. The lighting designs, by Lucy Carter and Simon Bennison, were too dark to see people’s expressions, and in a narrative as complex as this, that conspired against us.
We encountered women stalking on pointe as the music blew and thundered. They were the suicides, led by Dido (Anna Rose O’Sullivan). Luca Acri, as Aeneas, tenderly joined her, but left, and she went back to self-harm, cutting her forearm and finally stabbing herself in the stomach as the corps closed in.
Paul Kay and Joseph Sissens did an antic dance, labeled Soothsayers, and so it went on, women squabbling, a man Dante did an adagio with, and men cross-legged on floor bracing women. It was a procession of too many scenes that were too little developed.
The Thieves sections provided one of the few witty moments in the evening. Quoted in the program, Adès referred to Liszt and “Dante Sonata,” but it also sounded like an Orpheus reference, this time to Offenbach’s “Orphée aux Enfers.” Sissens did fouettés, the stage brightened and the rest of the men spin round and do tricks in isolation as the music blared out a jolly can-can.
Dante walked around unsteadily and the landscape became silver gray: we were at the coldest point in hell. That was from Dante, but Satan’s gender swap wasn’t: here Satan is a woman, and Watson danced a pas de deux with Fumi Kaneko, whacking her legs together and splitting her crotch open. Score: Gender Equality 0.5: Clarity: 0.
A shaft of light broke through to signify the transition to Purgatory. Dean’s designs were again striking: An immense solarized photo of a tree and low, bleached buildings and onstage, another possible Orpheus reference. Plain wooden benches made a line at the side, like Rolf Borzik’s high chairs in Pina Bausch’s epochal production of Gluck’s opera.
There was less ground to cover in “Purgatorio,” so the act felt more coherent. Dante and Virgil changed into different colored costumes of the same cut, blue and yellow for Virgil, Dante was in blue tipped at the shoulders with red. As when costuming Cunningham’s dances, even a simple color change helps provide a through-line. Dante joined five other men to form a sextet.
Adès’ music went from sampling haunting male chanted prayer of Syrian Jews to sounding like a brass section that had been petrified in fright. Virgil brought in three women, all aspects of Beatrice. Marco Masciari, who won the Prix de Lausanne last year, was featured as a young and loose-limbed Dante, dressed all in red, who danced with a young incarnation of Beatrice.
Watson danced a solo to chanting that slowly grew louder. He still had the intense presence, the drawn-out, spiky lines, the eloquent ability to turn in as well as out that made him one of the principal contemporary exponents in the company. He’s also 45, so occasionally a pirouette was hit-or-miss, but that was never the reason you watched him. Avis is 49, and between the two men, it was a rare opportunity to see what age brings as well as what it takes away, but that wasn’t dug into. Avis entered with two children, representations of young Dante and Beatrice running and playing: blessedly you didn’t have to ponder who they were; they wore the same costume as their adult counterparts.
One of the cleanest images of the show happened towards the end of the act. All six men line up, curved into different but related poses and held them. It was a dance image that conveyed more emotional than narrative resonance – you could understand it without worrying about reaching for a synopsis. There were very few times in “The Dante Project” you felt like that.
Virgil danced with Dante, and they did yet another swirling carry lift. You don’t need endless vocabulary (vide Paul Taylor and his “seven steps.”) but you do need to know how to make your vocabulary expressive.
Adès wasn’t having that problem. The music swelled after Virgil backed off the stage, leaving Dante. Sarah Lamb arrived as the final incarnation of Beatrice, and she and Watson danced to the pealing of bells. McGregor still had Watson pitch her into a 270º degree split, which may not be the best shorthand for divine love.
If there was little to no hint of a narrative in “Paradiso,” there’s less to cavil about in that choice. Ballet’s plotline for Act 3 is often “Everybody dances.” A projection at the top of stage showed concentric circles, arcing us from the rings of inferno to the spheres of the cosmos. It was more of what “The Dante Project” needed: ideas that didn’t need a program note to integrate into what you were seeing.
Paradise was dark, smoky and at times side-lit in a lurid shade of red. It looked a lot like the back room of a gay bar in Manhattan from the 1980s. Not that I’d know. Jokes aside, this isn’t the only time in a dance that paradise was not seen as white clouds and harps – there’s Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room.”
The women wore white, high-necked unitards. Two men entered who partnered with the women – more of the same low lifts: pick her up, carry her round. Too little of the movement palette changed between hell, purgatory and heaven: the same attitude poses, same high extensions. Watson danced with Melissa Hamilton, again diving her into crotch splits – which felt undifferentiated rather than like a rebellion against a chaste idea of heaven. A male solo had a more substantial vocabulary, including Cunningham-ish isolations for the arms.
The music built, couples swirled in. Finally Lamb came to Watson for a duet. She held her legs at lower angles; he kissed her hand and spun her. It was about as tender as McGregor gets. She left by backing out; Watson walked forward – shades of Albrecht’s reaction to his experience with the supernatural at the close of “Giselle.” The projection brightened to a painful level, strobed and blackout.
There was a lot of effort and resources expended, but there was too little to love in “The Dante Project.” It did have two juicy roles, one for Watson, the other for Avis, and it was a fitting end to Watson’s performing career. But visually and musically, it was stronger than it was choreographically. Some of the most promising dancers in the company may have had solos, but still felt underused. It’s hard to comment on Uzma Hameed’s dramaturgy, except that “The Dante Project” was no more comprehensible than if there had been no dramaturge. Her libretto missed the leap from the page to the stage.
It’s not as if others haven’t succeeded at making clearer dances. If you’d like to see a ballet that paces its movement ideas better, try “The Four Temperaments.” If you’d like to see character exposition done expertly in a similar structure, buy a ticket to “Enigma Variations.” McGregor tried to encompass too much, with results that were too similar.
copyright © 2021 by Leigh Witchel
“The Dante Project” – The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House, London
October 26, 2021
Cover: The Royal Ballet in “The Dante Project.” Photo: Andrej Uspenski.
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