Follow the movement

DYNASTIC dance drama chimes well with the remit of ballet, given the art form’s origins in imperial spectacle — where rulers would sanction a ballet’s topic, then demand courtly attendance and comprehension. Aptly enough, the interval at Scottish Ballet’s must-see performance of Mary Queen of Scots (HHHHI) buzzes with the sound of an audience comparing notes.

They had witnessed a splendid human chess game. A massive three-sided wall, raised and lowered to differing heights, had indicated the action of a larger hand whilst allowing for strategic entrances (a ducking under, an erect prance, a rolling slither) into gambits of delicious interplay and elaborated history.

Sophie Laplane, herself emerged from the Scottish Ballet ranks, is given the choreographic helm here, amid a gifted collaborative team. Mary Queen of Scots’ premiere is part of a longer sequence of full-length works put together by women for this troupe. Commissioning policy like this enlivens the form. The laurel of male entitlement (historically prevalent in the leadership of ballet as elsewhere) is ditched in favour of active probity.

Inventive and timely, Laplane’s ensemble choreography is vital to behold. There’s also marvellous pas de deux: one, danced en pointe by Anna Williams and Grace Horler, is a real breakthrough and alone worth the price of admission.

There’s a sense of right royal display during which moments of intentional playing-to-the-house can’t land. A driving score by Mikael Carlsson and Michael P Atkinson is too heavily amplified to allow sounds of audience reaction.

Walsingham, danced with panache by Thomas Edwards, and an aging QE1 role given by Charlotta Ofverholm impress with their level of ownership, and heroic Roseanna Leney as Mary, with lithe Evan Loudon as her Darnley polish off an array of daunting new moves. They inhabit a production whose self-celebration is impressively well earned.

A “fringe” Mary dwelt in Venus 2.0 (HHHII) — a tranche of alternative dance theatre audaciously staged by Impermanence. Theirs is the suffragette Mary Richardson who, drawing attention to a vital cause, slashed a priceless canvas (Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus) and was then jailed, suffering the mind-warping violence of Holloway prison.

Afterward, Richardson apparently felt the echo of suffragette fervour and recourse to violent protest in her organised embrace of British fascism. The selective memoir she later issued parallels that of many a well-heeled monster.

Impermanence’s performers touch on all the above, via meandering riffs that may vex punters drawn by the stated topic.

The work is collectively choreographed. Performative strengths happen up inconsistently. Strong passages suddenly evaporate while expositions outstay welcome. There’s an abiding sense of bright sparks.

There’s also virtue in the present-time airing of radio transcripts of fascist and futurist speeches. These play out in the contemporaneous brew, undercutting mercurial stage action with chilling specifics.

This creative team finds wayward mileage in the representation of activism in an evoked realm of traumatised self-delusion and shifting goalposts. They notice Moseley, Marinetti, and those Mitfords and divvy them up into animated effigies. It gets interesting when Unity is on the scene – Yes, Unity Mitford, given a fierce twist by contemporary dance diamond Oxana Pachenko.

The performers of Figures in Extinction (HHHHI) – all members of Nederlands Dance Theater – expertly embody a work of anthropology as created by choreographer Crystal Pite and director Simon McBurney: a performing arts dream-team that additionally trawls methodologies and script writing from McBurney’s company Complicite.

I suspect many in this audience – dancers themselves, recreationally or professionally – are drawn by the promise of choreographed spectacle (albeit with a score of words rather than music) maybe feeling equivocal about a cerebral scenario but ready to go the distance. Given Figures in Extinction’s verbalised idea-mongering, dramatic scenography, and manipulative soundscape there’s no escaping explanation this time round.  

The show portrays adorable never-to-return species and climate-change causes thereof, starting with an alphabetical list of extinct species; each poetically described and exquisitely danced. I clocked how none of these vignettes outstayed their welcome and stifled a genuine sob. Human imitation of animals stirs a primal pulse. But do animals know their initials? Those beyond P get short shrift. Time has run out thanks to the intervention of a climate-change denier who bursts in while the rubric of extinct species still hovers.

The denier’s rant is lip-synched as if his whole body were labial. His act of platforming peters out. Might we all follow suit?

Act 2 pressed buttons with its romp through an explication of perception. As the fleet ensemble gyrated and reshuffled, a vibrant text about the human gift/burden of cerebral facility began to chime with my own feelings about dance training; about how learning could take the form of dancing.

Here are people who have, by desire, undergone a contemporary dance discipline that impels full and equal ownership of physical articulations and their purpose. The thinking athletes are placed to know everything about the production they are in. There’s no hierarchy. All give it the max at the gifted behest of Pite/McBurney, but it doesn’t stop there.

A third act sidesteps the body politic, freighting instead a realm of sentimental conclusion. But essentially these people will keep dancing. Raft-like, I cling to that.

Mary Queen of Scots is on tour. For more information see: scottishballet.co.uk https://scottishballet.co.uk/whats-on/mary-queen-of-scots/
Venus 2.0 is on tour. For more information see: impermanence.co.uk https://www.impermanence.co.uk/event/venus-2-0
Figures in Extinction will run at Sadlers Wells, November 5-8. For more information see: sadlerswells.com https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/nederlands-dans-theater-complicite-figures-in-extinction/