English National Ballet\u2019s new season launches with a quadruple bill that follows a loose thread through ballet\u2019s evolution over the best part of a century. You can see the inheritance, morphing across the decades, as well as one work of rebellion.<\/p>\n
We start in 1947, but looking back to the late 19th century, with George Balanchine\u2019s Theme and Variations, a neoclassical piece aping the Russian imperial ballet. It gently sparkles (that\u2019s not just the diamant\u00e9 necklaces) and proudly lays out its patterns and steps, academic in presentation but infused with deep love of the form, as if saying: \u201cHere is ballet, isn\u2019t it beautiful?!\u201d Yet within that formality there is hidden swagger, in certain angles for example, that plants it firmly in the 20th century.<\/p>\n
Buttery d\u00e9velopp\u00e9s \u2026 Alice Mariani, centre, in Theme and Variations with ENB. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/the Guardian<\/p>\n
The company are impressive in quick and effortless footwork, but the leading roles go to guest stars Alice Mariani from Milan\u2019s La Scala and Ricardo Castellanos from Norwegian National Ballet. Mariani\u2019s weightless d\u00e9velopp\u00e9s are perfection, rock solid but buttery soft. She\u2019s a real star. There\u2019s great orchestral playing under the baton of musical director Maria Seletskaja<\/a> and especially in the main pas de deux, a sensitive solo violin in conversation with the dancers. The whole thing is like a spell, only broken on a final precarious lift.<\/p>\n Where ballet dancers like Mariani are illusionists, all the effort magicked away, the legendary choreographer Martha Graham<\/a>, whose piece Errand into the Maze also premiered in 1947, was a realist, leaning in to gravity\u2019s pull and the trials of dancing and being human. Graham is the fork in the road, who made dance modern, and Errand into the Maze is a stark, striking, stylised duet, a woman versus her fears, depicted as a Minotaur-type character. At first dancer Emily Suzuki seems too featherlight for this weighty role, but as the piece progresses, her movement\u2019s focus hardens with her character\u2019s resolve. And as she\u2019s drawn deeper into her heroine\u2019s journey, she pulls the audience with her.<\/p>\n Stark and stylised \u2026 Emily Suzuki and Rentaro Nakaaki in Errand into the Maze. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n