Wind Wound: Tharp and Pita at the Royal Ballet
The Illustrated ‘Farewell’ and The Wind
The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House
Royal Box, general rehearsal
3 November 2017
ROH page
I hate to admit it but I think the evidence suggests that Arthur Pita is a bit hit and miss. His Stepmother/Stepfather was everything I wished it could be, but his Osipova-Polunin collaboration Run Mary Run makes me sad when I think about it, and The Wind is worse.
A colleague suggested the heart of the problem lies with Pita’s decision to take a feature-length film itself formerly a novel and condense it into a forty-minute ballet. Pita certainly hasn’t done himself any favours, and clearly struggles to find a narrative arc that fits the contour of the ballet he wants to make. Thus we have a lot of Ed Watson in a spangly spooky cowboy costume weirding out in the wind; we have lots of RB men in camp cowboy costume ho-downing in the wind; we even have an alright pas de deux between Soares, Osipova and a wedding veil in the wind (presumably the mental image that drew Pita down this dangerous path). What we don’t have is a whole lot of story, until the last five minutes, when we have a rape and a murder and then it ends.
It’s partly bad timing. It’s not Pita’s fault that The Wind is the fourth rape-heavy show I’ve seen at the Royal Opera House within a fortnight (after The Judas Tree, Les Vêpres siciliennes and the first half of the general for Lucia di Lammermoor). But it’s also bad taste. For a rape to be the only significant event in a story you better have something you know you want to say about it, and serving it with large helpings of cowboy roustabouting and thee massive wind machines isn’t going to help your case. Not even if you’re Arthur Pita.
The Tharp separates itself into two parts, the new bit and the old bit, and it’s partly disappointing, partly encouraging that I far prefer the old bit. New for 2017 is a lengthy pas de deux for Sarah Lamb and Steven McRae set to the first two movements of the Haydn Farewell. The ballet was explicitly commissioned as a technical showpiece for these two and that, I guess, is pretty much what it is. It’s a given two that these super-humans are impressive; but my enthusiasm dimmed step after empty classical step, not even the Tharpy swaggers thrown in every now and again enough to convince me that this was anything more than a technical exercise.
I was much more charmed by the 1973 creation for a large ensemble of soloists, set to the final two movements of the Farewell. Like the 2017 element, it it a showcase for the dancers of the Royal Ballet, but in a very different way. From the two dancers who begin and end the piece (Mayara Magri and Joseph Sissens), through the lead ensemble of three men and two women, through the further group of ten that complete the ensemble: all 17 look beautiful and move wonderfully in choreography that seems to capture the qualities of any great ensemble, dance or otherwise – of strength and freedom, of individualism partnered with unity.
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