Review: London City Ballet’s MOMENTUM, Sadler’s Wells
Artistic Director Christopher Marney of London City Ballet has curated an evening that paints a picture in colour and movement, harmonising choreographies into a vibrant whole. With references to Kandinsky woven both literally and poetically into dance, Momentum reflects his vision of a “regenerated company”: something to prove, yet a heritage to retain. This evening of works feels very much aligned with that mission.
The four sections are marked by distinct choreographers, composers and colour palettes, offering a vivid journey.
The performance opens with George Balanchine’s Haieff Divertimento. A once-lost ballet of the 1940s, first revived in 1985, it shimmers under a backdrop of blue. Technically mesmerising, its disrupted lines and intricate shapes are at once exciting and visibly demanding for the dancers. Still, there is joie de vivre to the piece, a sparkling quality for the start of the evening.
Liam Scarlett’s Consolations & Liebestraum, set to Franz Liszt’s piano score, shifts the tone in a palette of black, contrasted by the dancers’ skin tones and heightened by Andrew Ellis’s lighting. The movement is more emotive, clean in its design, yet with something deliberately withheld. A melancholic oscillation between isolation and connection underpins the work, giving it a haunting resonance. It notably brings guest Artist Alina Cojocaru to the stage with luminous artistry. Through intricate partnering, the ballet traces the course of a relationship, its blossoming intimacy and inevitable fracture, with sensitivity.
Florent Melac then presents Soft Shore, in silver and grey, a work with a gentle, masculine quality. Constance Devernay-Laurence shines here, joined by Alejandro Virelles, Arthur Wille and Joseph Taylor.
After the interval comes the programme’s centrepiece: Alexei Ratmansky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, first created for New York City Ballet in 2014. To Modest Mussorgsky’s score, the ballet unfolds against Wassily Kandinsky’s celebrated masterpieces, projected in all their glory and animated by Adeline André’s inventive costumes. Each patch of colour on them transforms, becoming a living embodiment of the paintings themselves as they shift across the giant screen. Kandinsky’s art – vibrating colour, distilled line, charged with emotion – resonates powerfully in this work. He was a pioneer of abstraction. His studies of modern dancers and his Dance Curves sketches, which sought the “simplicity of the whole form,” are realised here in movement, alongside a poetic exploration of colour. Ratmansky’s ballet becomes a laboratory for Kandinsky’s ambition: it’s not flawless, with its smudges and stumbles, but honest and at times even humorous. There is a modernist energy, a sense of disruption poised on the edge of innovation, while remaining rooted in respect for form and tradition.
London City Ballet’s programme is a bold statement of intent. Through intelligent curation and collaboration with world-renowned artists, the company makes a persuasive case for its place in the dance world. Not every work is flawless, but together they create a richly textured evening where art and movement collide.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Stephanie Osztreicher