Northern Ballet: Casanova review – a seductive debut


Kenneth Tindall’s Casanova for Northern Ballet is a lustrous production, admirable in the ambitious breadth of its canvas. Until 2015, Tindall was a dancer with the company, and this is his first full-evening work. That he meets the challenge of narrative ballet with such brio is a testament to Northern’s director, David Nixon. A prolific choreographer himself for many years, Nixon now concentrates on nurturing younger talent, with Charlotte Edmonds and Carlos Pons Guerra among those whom he has drawn into his creative orbit.

Tindall’s ballet opens in Venice, where Giacomo Casanova (Giuliano Contadini) is preparing for a career in holy orders. The paranoia and claustrophobia of the city are powerfully evoked by Christopher Oram’s sets, a succession of richly gilded interiors illuminated by stiletto-thin shafts of light. Incense hangs in the air, inquisitors wait in the shadows. In this hushed, penumbral realm, Casanova is a starkly vivid presence, and it’s not long before he’s caught in flagrante with a pair of errant convent girls (Abigail Prudames and Minju Kang, on an assertive form) and forced to reconsider his vocation.

Casanova’s seductions – inevitably, there are plenty – are nicely drawn by Tindall. Forgoing the orgasmic kitsch that new ballet so often serves up, he gives us subtle masques of advance and retreats to the measured cadences of Kerry Muzzey’s score. His lovers observe the erotic courtesies. They look each other in the eye, and address each other’s bodies with elaborate consideration, even if, as is more than once the case, they happen to be fornicating on a dining table.

Choreographically, Tindall is unconstrained by period. The ensemble dances for nuns, seminarians and others have a strongly expressionistic look to them, all arch and contraction, redolent of Kenneth MacMillan at his most Teutonic. The orgy scenes, meanwhile, show Tindall at his most painterly. Where MacMillan gave us befuddled Hogarthian excess, Tindall gives us colossal fleshly entwinings worthy of Géricault, shot through with self-loathing and dread.

So the sex is good, which is important. And the piece looks and sounds splendid. But who was Giacomo Casanova? What drove him? Tindall created his scenario with Ian Kelly, author of The Life of Casanova on which the ballet is based, and the result is an episodic biography in dance, heavy on events but light on human insight. Act 1 is essentially exposition; the piece only acquires tension and narrative momentum well into Act 2. And even then it’s overpopulated; Voltaire (Dale Rhodes), in particular, is de trop. Because dance is always in essence metaphor, it becomes uncomfortable when constrained by byzantine plotlines. You can write the story of Giselle, which has the best ballet plot of all, on the back of a postcard. That the creation of dance steps is only half of the narrative ballet maker's job, and that a sophisticated understanding of story structure is at least as important, as a lesson that only experience teaches. That said, Casanova is a handsome piece of work, and Tindall has every reason to be proud of it.

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