Ballet's magical history tour

Royal New Zealand Ballet

Aotea Centre

Review: Tara Werner

Jiri Kylian's powerful work Soldatenmis strongly communicates a potent anti-war message with its striking balletic imagery. As Kylian describes it, the dance was choreographed as "a piece commenting on the idiocy of war."

Set to Martinu's evocative Polni Mse, music written on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Holland in the Second World War, Soldatenmis, in terms of its deeply felt personal expression, is light years away in style from the highly mannered world of Petipa's Raymonda.

It is this vivid contrast - in many ways a Cook's tour of the history of classical ballet - that has made the Royal New Zealand Ballet's triple bill, which opened on Saturday night, an arresting artistic success.

A trio of completely different ballets created by three of the world's great choreographers in 1898, 1956 and 1980, gives plenty of scope for stylistic comparison.

Of the three, Balanchine's Allegro Brillante impresses most in regard to the dancers' discipline and technique. All the choreographer's hallmark characteristics are there in his creation of abstract patterns of movement unfolding in an intimate relationship with the music.

Danced to Tchaikovsky's Third Piano Concerto, the vigorous integration of music and dance appears seamless. Jane Turner and Ou Lu's pas de deux in the cadenza section is danced with total fluidity, while the four accompanying couples also seem to enjoy the challenge of precise timing in a constantly changing kaleidoscope.

In comparison, while the sheer emotional power of Soldatenmis cannot be denied - and the 11 men and one woman on stage dance and sing their hearts out (even joining in a hymn at one point) - by the end of half an hour there is a sense of having been battered by the message.

Many of the movements were somewhat repetitive, as if the choreographer had run out of ideas in an exhaustive attempt to communicate the sheer futility of violence.

Raymonda is at the other extreme of the emotional spectrum.

While Patricia Ruanne's staging is very true to Petipa in terms of its Maryinsky Theatre setting 100 years ago (the dancers' costumes strongly evoke that tradition), the ballet comes across as more of a relic of the past than a living, vibrant art.

Natasha Purcell as Raymonda danced beautifully in her solo during the pas de deux, balanced by Johnny Bovang's hovering leaps as Jean de Brienne. And Ou Lu and Diana Shand made an attractive Hungarian couple.

But apart from the famous Grand Pas Hongrois (grand Hungarian dance), the corp de ballet, in typical Petipa fashion, had little to do and was mainly used for pictorial effect.

This production of Raymonda, set to Glazunov's music, was an attractive but essentially highly stylised museum piece. It may have succeeded on those terms, but with little else.