Strikingly beautiful and still in her twenties, ex-Ballets Russes dancer Ninette de Valois founded her Academy of Choreographic Art in 1926. A hundred years later, Covent Garden is honouring the Royal Ballet School (as it became) with a programme of works old and new danced by stars from the Royal and Birmingham Royal Ballets and students from the school that made them.
The 12-course banquet began with a suite from 1937’s Checkmate, not seen at the Royal Opera House since 2011. De Valois’s two years with the Ballet Russes had taught her the importance of gesamtkunstwerk: “Everything I learnt about running a company I learnt from Diaghilev,” she said when I interviewed her in 1996. Checkmate is a dramatised endgame set to a commissioned score by Arthur Bliss with a startling expressionist setting by the graphic designer E McKnight Kauffer. Mayari Magri coped well with De Valois’s scything legwork for the dominatrix Black Queen and Reece Clarke gave an electrifying account of the Red Knight’s mazurka, flanked by a perky octet of pawns from the Royal Ballet School.
There followed a long overdue revival of Frederick Ashton’s Birthday Offering, created to celebrate the Royal Ballet’s silver jubilee in 1956 and set to a potpourri of Alexander Glazunov. Marianela Nuñez took the Margot Fonteyn role, showing off her exquisite proportions and sublime facility in serene promenades en attitude with the courtly Patricio Revé. The seven ballerina variations (some of Ashton’s many homages to Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty) were deftly done. Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Katherine Ochoa was a miracle of musicality and poise, ditto the Royal Ballet’s Akane Takada: pirouettes out of nowhere with a freeze-frame finish.
“Respect the past, herald the future but concentrate on the present,” insisted De Valois, and the programme’s slightly uneven central section was dominated by new and recent works. Beautiful Shadow is a world premiere by Christopher Wheeldon featuring the well-matched Lauren Cuthbertson and Lukas B Brændsrød. The score is by Benjamin Britten, who also fuelled Cathy Marston’s Night Falling, a tender duet for Matthew Ball and William Bracewell. Wayne McGregor supplied Nimbus, created in 2007, a year after his shock appointment as the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer. Unforgettable by current Royal Ballet soloist Joshua Junker was a sparky number pondering the nature of fandom and celebrity set to an Elvis remix and powerfully led by Brændsrød and Liam Boswell.
The evening’s loudest applause was for the third act which included a trailer for this autumn’s run of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon and a show-stopping (and unexpectedly dramatic) account of the Black Swan pas de deux in which Fumi Kaneko pirouetted Vadim Muntagirov into submission. The long evening closed with Centenary, a beautifully crafted grand défilé by Royal Ballet soloist Valentino Zucchetti which flooded the stage with students, soloists and principals. De Valois, reflecting on the many stars she had made, warned against ancestor worship: “They were wonderful dancers but it’s absurd to say we haven’t produced some great dancers since then . . . Every generation does its duty — in the end”.
★★★★☆
To October 10, rbo.org.uk