Joyce Theater Presents LONDON CITY BALLET Review

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Joyce Theater LONDON CITY BALLET — L-R Dancers Ellie Young Joseph Taylor.

In a penultimate moment, a female dancer who is being held aloft positions her legs into a diamond. Our attention is drawn to the angles of her pose and the choreography’s geometric patterning as a whole. The image freezes in our mind, even as the dance progresses.

The dancers are bathed in changing hues of lighting— reds, oranges, blues and more. They are wearing costumes with a diaphanous slip of skirt only on one side. These irregular costumes seemed to announce as soon as choreographer Arielle Smith’s Five Dances began, that we are in for a jolt re-imagining of the ballet genre. Indeed! This is elegance that includes moves like torsos doing wormlike ripples and bodies gliding quickly cross stage even more than pliés and flying jêtés.

Four Distinct Works in One Performance

In the evening’s opener, Larina Waltz set to Tchaikovsky music, the female dancers flutter in long tutus as their male counterparts lift them up and down. It’s a focus on ballerina on pointe grace. That’s lovely, you too might have been thinking, and perhaps also with a bit of worry that this would be the style of the entire repertoire.

Just when we might have been squirming at the thought of ballet-so-vanilla for two hours, Liam Scarlett’s Consolation and Liebestraum set to a live Liszt piano score transitions us to our more modern (2009) aesthetic and poke into what dance can be. Bookended by a lone woman dancer kneeling in a spotlight and gesturing as though turning a page or closing a chapter, a sequence of duets explore the many phases of love relationships from spark to tensions, re-discovery, longing and then separation and end. Not a story ballet per se, it instead tells many stories of connection, tension, re-connection and then loss.

You too might agree that these three pre-intermission works would more than suffice as a full program. The perfection of the dancers never fails. But we did return after a 15 minute break to see Eve, described in program notes as a more Eve-centric telling of the tale in the Garden of Eden. Eve seeks out the serpent and we certainly get that its quite the carnal ride. Think ballerina with a touch of pole dancer, yet ever so graceful.

For this reviewer, seeing and feeling Smith’s circa now choreography after starting off with a ballet that feels so super-distilled classic actually added to our enjoyment of Smith’s work and the feeling of deep satisfaction with the evening program as a whole. These are different works, unified most by the dancer’s’ grace. We feel uplifted and reminded why we love dance.

Joyce Theater Hosts a Historic Comeback

As preludes to the first two works, we watched short film snippets featuring the late Princess Diana encouraging the work of the London Ballet. This troupe had been on ice for decades, which is why most in the audience had likely never seen them before. Based on the quality of this performance, this reviewer expects that they will be doing the rounds in the US for years to come.