Winning Aussies save Covent Garden's summer

Kunstkamer – Artists Of The Australian Ballet, photo by Daniel Boud, from Graham Spicer's website Gramilano

by Alastair Macaulay 

The Australian Ballet, returning to Covent Garden after thirty-five years (it played the London Coliseum earlier this century), has transformed London’s dance summer by bringing George Balanchine’s endlessly absorbing pure-dance triple bill, “Jewels” (1967), back to Covent Garden for four performances this week. The Australians are not quite one of the world’s top-tier ballet companies, but they’re an entirely good one that could break into greatness under David Hallberg, their new artistic director. 

The lucidity they bring to basic ballet technique is striking. (The clean, light attack with which their women step into shining arabesque positions is a distinct pleasure.) And they show more versatility in the three constituent ballets of “Jewels” (“Emeralds,” Rubies”, “Diamonds”) than several famous European companies. 

What nobody can miss about “Jewels” is how brilliantly diverse its three component ballets are. “Emeralds” is a chivalrous, mediaevalist romance, Romantically and elegiacally poetic, to Fauré music; “Rubies”, to Stravinsky’s capriccio for piano and orchestra, is intensely and jazzily urbane, impishly  modernist; “Diamonds,” to four movements of Tchaikovsky’s five-movement third symphony, is imperially spacious. 

A cliché is to say that “Emeralds” is French, “Rubies” is American, “Diamonds” is Russian; but all three require the brisk technique that the Russian-born Balanchine (1904-1983) brought to a new peak in twentieth-century America. Most European companies tend to slow “Jewels” and other Balanchine ballets down. Even if “Emeralds” is French in atmosphere, the Paris Opera dances it less well than several American companies. 

“Diamonds” seems Russian, suggesting both snowy landscapes and glittering Tsarist courts, but the Russian accent with which the Bolshoi dances it can feel intrusive. The Royal Ballet has been invariably hopeless in “Rubies”, has slowed “Diamonds” into lethargy, and is inclined to overact in all three. 

Yet all three ballets are unpretentiously alive and marvellously detailed with the Australian dancers. What’s more, the construction of the triple bill is rendered so clear that we can see, fascinatingly, the many features that the three ballets have in common. There are upper-body movements shared in all three ballets; walking is a motif in all three, as are certain ballet steps. (The entrances and exits throughout the three ballets, from principals to corps, are among the greatest in all ballet. One of Balanchine’s masterstrokes comes when he seems to end “Emeralds” with a splendidly harmonious tableau – originally he did – but then, with an finale that he added in 1975, he has the ten female corps dancers slowly retreat from the stage, leaving the seven central dancers in a movingly courteous ensemble that deepens the ballet’s Arthurian mystery.)

Most marvellous of all, Jennings’s staging shows – lightly, without overemphasis – that each of the three ballets contains a female-male romance of profound if enigmatic drama: a drama of body language but without any facial acting. In all three, it’s always evident that these women and these women are already known to one another – and yet in all three it becomes apparent that each ballerina keeps both eluding her partner, keeps changing shape and in his arms, sometimes darkly addressing the floor with face, torso, and arms, as if she is as much a fabulous mythological beast as a woman. 

It’s evident that the Australians, though already proceeding along the right lines throughout, have way to go to make their “Jewels” great rather than brightly good. In all three, Balanchine was asking dancers to project their physicality with a three-dimensional energy as if into infinite space: the Australians are vivid but don’t yet dance as if changing the air high above tor beyond them. (A great “Jewels” shows you time-and-space physics on an immense scale.) 

“Emeralds” is widely loved (it’s really the most singular and poetic of the three), but, paradoxically, is also famous as a much-loved ballet that no cast since Balanchine’s original dancers has ever caught to perfection. It’s only here, curiously, that the Australian dancers’ attack is too soft. In the central role created by Violette Verdy, Sharni Spencer is more sweet than scintillating, but her admirably paced and focused delivery keeps deepening the ballet’s spell; and her partner Callum Linnane is excellent – knightly and alert. In “Rubies,” Ako Kondo and Brett Chynoweth show the roguish comedy and off-balance zip at the ballet’s heart; his role can have further dynamo peaks of speed and elevation than he shows, while she doesn’t show the enigma mystery under the bright façade. 

The sublime ballerina role in “Diamonds” is traditionally associated with tall ballerinas, but Benedicte Bemet reminds me how Balanchine cast Kay Mazzo and Allegra Kent (both petite) in it, and how the Royal Ballet’s first “Diamonds” ballerina was the tiny but compelling Alina Cojocaru. Bernet makes much of the role’s arc: neither the off-balance largesse of her Scherzo nor the ebullient sweep of the finale could have been predicted from the quiet absorption of her Andante. Like all the company, she already understands the risk-taking nature of Balanchine’s classicism. And her English partner, Joseph Caley (English), shares the excellent partnering of his Australian colleagues: though without much amplitude of style, he’s a pleasing stage presence and deft technician. 

But the company is fielding several casts until Saturday. “Jewels” changes with every soloist. Balanchine was the master-choreographer of ballet, and indeed the choreographer most admired by other choreographers (including those in modern dance). 2023 is the fortieth anniversary of his death. Those forty years have made him a yet more global influence than his lifetime. For London, this production is already the great Balanchine event of this anniversary year.

First published at slippedisc, August 3, 2023

NB: Alastair Macaulay has his own website, Alastair Macaulay, where he uploads essays of his own authorship, although this one does not appear there and is exclusive to slippedisc.