A deft balance between old and new - Fourteen Days, BalletBoyz, Sadler's Wells, review


Well, it’s certainly an intriguing idea. For their new show, the BalletBoyz – the young, 11-strong, all-male troupe under the aegis of original BalletBoyz Michael Nunn and William Trevitt – commissioned four choreographers and composers each to create a short new piece. The catch? They had only two weeks in which to create it – and, to up the ante still, further, every work had to tackle, in some way or other, the theme of balance.

Inevitably, this sort of high-concept project is going to yield mixed results, as well as being light (to say the least) on set-design. And yet, it offers the unusual spectacle of four brand-new pieces on a single night, and there’s certainly some fun to be had along the way.

In fact, the nearest the evening gets to any sort of set is the gigantic seesaw that sits at the centre of The Title is in the Text, the opening collaboration, and one between two venerable mischief-makers. Scott Walker’s score is genuine, shriekingly apocalyptic-sounding, with the odd bit of pre-recorded nonsensical speech also thrown in for good measure, while Javier De Frutos has his dancers stand, hang, balance and pose on the (as it were) pivotal apparatus in all sorts of tricksy permutations. Overall, it feels like an exploration-in-dance of the so-called law of the lever, though at times – and in one particularly spry little pattern – it also looks rather like one of those “Newton’s cradle” executive desk toys writ large. Hardly life-changing, but it holds the attention.

If De Frutos fleetingly turns his dancers into ball-bearings, Iván Pérez seems keener to turn his into horses. In The Human Animal – to a lively score by Joby Talbot – the performers canter in tight-formation circles around the stage, often pausing to “paw” at the ground in agreeably equine fashion. Once again, this human dressage doesn’t add up to a great deal, but its 13 minutes pass quickly.

The last of the four pieces, the percussive, aggressive, clog-dancing-inspired The Indicator Line (steps by Craig Revel Horwood, music by Charlotte Harding) thumps along with an energetic kind of symmetry for its nine minutes though fizzles swiftly from the memory. Smaller but more substantial is the preceding duet – Us, with music by Keaton Henson and steps by none other than Christopher Wheeldon. This pairs two dancers in an eight-minute study of intimacy and mutual dependency – maybe erotic, maybe platonic (you could read it either way). And, thanks to the intensity, fluidity and emotional charge of Wheeldon’s steps, Henson’s elegiac score, and performances of complete commitment from Jordan Robson and Bradly Waller, it’s the straight-sets standout of the four newbies.

After this four-strong, a mixed-blessing blast of novelty comes the intelligently programmed “sure thing” of Fallen, the full-company piece created for the company in 2013 by Russell Maliphant. The troupe pour all their muscular athleticism into this riveting, symphonic abstract work-out – beautifully lit by longstanding Maliphant collaborator Michael Hulls, and driven along by the propulsive ostinato of Armand Amar’s music. Wednesday night’s audience rightly adored it – on which subject, there was a rare and heartening mixture in the stalls of gaggles of adoring teenagers and older Sadler’s regulars. Well done those Boyz.

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