London City Ballet takes flight in a double bill of haunting beauty.
A single lamp burns on an otherwise empty stage, and around it, one by one, the ghosts of ballet begin to appear. This is the world of Ghost Light, John Neumeier’s 2020 work and the first half of London City Ballet’s double bill, which takes its title from the lamp left burning in a darkened theatre until life returns to the stage.
Without a main storyline, Ghost Light’s meaning arrives through dancers who drift and reappear in new combinations, form and loosen relationships so that the audience is carried along an emotional journey that settles in the end into a sense of unity. The soft, flowing lines of the costumes allow the dancers to look less like half-remembered presences, while Schubert’s meditative piano music binds the whole into reverie. Alina Cojocaru, guest artist at every performance, is wistful and beautifully tentative as the Swan Princess, her pas de deux with Joseph Taylor is among the high points of the half.
The second performance, Firebird, flips the atmosphere. For Glen Tetley’s gothic retelling, made for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1981 and revived in the centenary year of his birth, its dramatic narrative is driven forward by Stravinsky’s famously vivid score. The costumes are of the more traditional ballet, with Victorian touches for the family and a suitably alarming skeleton for Arthur Henderson, who doubles as the controlling father and the villainous Kotschei. Ellie Young is superb as the Firebird – free-spirited and fiercely expressive – partnered beautifully by Taylor as Ivan, while the male ensemble of birds is vivid and technically brilliant. To see Mette Hønningen, the original Firebird, take a bow alongside the designer John Macfarlane was a lovely treat.
The dancing throughout is a pleasure for the eyes, and the variety of movement across the two halves is remarkable. Moving from the fragmentary, flowing and often tender shapes of Ghost Light to the forceful, soaring and classically grounded vocabulary of Tetley, the sixteen dancers of the company meet each demand with a talent and polish providing effortless transitions.
The evening is about renewal and memory. It is hard not to read it as the company’s own story, for both works are revivals: Ghost Light was first created for Hamburg Ballet in 2020, during lockdown, when Neumeier could only work with small groups of dancers and the piece was finally assembled once theatres reopened while Tetley’s Firebird has been rebuilt from rehearsal notes and archival film and the original Firebird, Mette Hønningen. London City Ballet has spent three years switching the light back on and, on this showing, has no intention of letting it go out again.
Firebird is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until Saturday 24th October.