Ballet Nights 008

Cadogan Hall, London
June 5, 2025

Ballet Nights sprang into Summer with the eighth London edition of the popular evening of music and dance at Cadogan Hall, bringing sunshine to the evening, even if the weather outside was not playing ball.

After the now traditional music recital opening from pianist Viktor Erik Emanuel and Ballade No.4 in F Minor by Frédéric Chopin, the dance opened with Richard Alston’s Dutiful Ducks. Originally a solo for Michael Clark, the five-minute dance to a poem by the Charles Amirkhanian, it was created in 1986 when Alston was experimenting with text-sound compositions. It wears its age well. Northern Ballet’s Harris Beattie handled the significant classical content of Alston’s choreography with ease, even though it’s constantly thrown awry by the insistent rhythms of Amirkhanian’s voice and the oft repeated words of the title.

Jordan James Bridge is something of a serial Ballet Nights choreographer, as compere Jamiel Devernay Laurence put it. Well, when his output is as impressive as String Theory, why not? Dancer Leila Wright was very much in dialogue with the live composer-violinist Dominic Stokes, who joined her on stage. Often quite playful, Wright sometimes seems driven by the instrument and its music, but then looks at it, daring it you feel to go further. I’m not entirely convinced of the value of the floorwork, but my only real gripe was the early lighting, so dark you could barely see anything

‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ (I have become lost to the world), is the final song of Gustav Mahler’s haunting Five Rückert Songs, a collection of five poems by Friedrich Rückert set to music by the composer. Peter Darrell’s choreography of the same title traces the emotional arc of someone simply called, ‘The Woman.’ The excerpt danced was dedicated to Eleanor Moore, who in 1972 became the first Scottish born principal dancer of Scottish Ballet.

Accompanied by Emmanuel on piano and soprano Hannah Diennes Williams, former Scottish Ballet and Estonian National Ballet principal dancer Eve Musto gave a beautiful, subtle and sensitive performance. The music alone is heart-wrenchingly divine but Williams’ singing and Musto’s dancing took everything river over the edge edge. But even better was to come.

They may be an unknown quantity to British audiences but the ballet company of the Staatstheater Augsburg, from a city around 30 miles north-west of Munich, has a super reputation for quality contemporary ballet and contemporary dance. I suspect anyone at Ballet Nights 008 will still be talking about them because Nemesis by Ihsan Rustem was quite simply terrific.

The work was originally made for Ballett Staatstheater Augsburg’s Made for Two evening of duets premiered in December 2024. In purple tops and pants, and with tongues firmly in cheeks, Martina Piacentino and Alfonso López González begin a conversation in movement to the aria ‘Casta Diva’ from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma. The dance is full of exaggerated gestures and facial expressions. Their timing was absolutely spot on. It was so good you could imagine the words. And just when you think it’s over, Rustem surprises with a second section, danced dynamically with some truly fabulous lifts and supports, to composer Benjamine Clementine’s composition from which the piece takes its title.

It quite rightly brought the best raction of the evening. Nemesis is a real juicy nugget of a work, one that makes you want to see more of Rustem’s choreography and the Augsburg company.

The first half closed with the UK premiere of William Forsythe’s Slingerland Duet with Sangeun Lee and Gareth Haw, making their seventh and eighth Ballet Nights appearances respectively. Sleek and streamlined, it’s eight wonderful minutes of classical ballet. Danced to Gavin Bryars’ String Quartet No.1, the couple made everything look fluid, easy and unforced. Lee, in the thinnest of thin, potato crisp-shaped tutus, demonstrated perfectly the feeling of off-balance stretching but being reined back.

The second half of the evening opened not with Victor Erik Emmanuel as usual, but the Quartet Concrète playing two pieces by Danish composers. Frederick Sjölin’s Intermezzo conjured up images of birds singing. Shine No More by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen is a reel-like tune in which notes fly equally joyfully but with a decidedly folksy feel, evoking pictures of a fiddler and dancers on a country village green.

La Oración, a world premiere solo choreographed by Joaquin De Luz for Denys Cherevychko to music by Joaquin Turina is inspired by the quiet rituals of a bullfighter. The still has its fireworks, some fabulous pirouettes and turns in attitude in particular, but they are short outbursts amidst the introspection. Encompassing presence, tension and emotionality, Cherevychko made mush use of his cape, swirling it, wearing it like a skirt, cradling it like a baby and more, all suggesting thoughts of life beyond the arena.

SPLICE, choreographed and performed by Hannah Ekholm and Faye Stoesser, who together go by the name Ekleido, brought something very different. To a score by Floating Points, it opens with the pair kneeling, backs to the audience dancing almost exclusively with their arms. The synchronicity was fabulous.

When they came to standing, employing voguing, wacking and contemporary dance, they constantly folded around each other, almost always in contact. It really was a very complex intertwining of bodies, a sort of human puzzle. Some of the ways they knotted themselves together made you wonder how they were ever going to find release. But not only did they, but so seamlessly.

A shout out too for the costumes by George H. Wale and Octavia Austin Costume Design: beautiful black and silver-striped affairs giving them a quasi-skeletal appearance, those stripes looking a little like bones.

I Married Myself by Christopher Wheeldon, is the live stage adaptation of the climactic finale solo of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino’s series, Étoile, screened on Amazon Prime Video. In the show, Constance Devernay-Laurence, who performed here, starred as the dancing double for lead character Lou De Laâge, as well as acting the part of one of the Paris dancers, Mélanie.

It’s a fine piece of dance. Devernay-Laurence danced expressively, appearing to capture a number of emotions, with the finale in particular having a sense of release, joy and freedom. However, it is quite difficult to get a firm handle on the piece if you have no knowledge of the series, the context for the dance and how the character got to where she is.

As impressive as the Balcony pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet is, it is rarely seen as a closing piece on evenings such as Ballet Nights. That’s usually reserved for something with a few more fireworks. But Anna Rose O’Sullivan, in a Ballet Nights debut, and Reece Clarke pulled out all the stops in a fine end to Ballet Nights 008, both projecting the tingling excitement of young love quite beautifully.

The next Ballet Nights, is on September 10 & 11, 2025, also at Cadogan Hall. Titled Bound in Motion, it will feature Royal Ballet principals Fumi Kaneko and Vadim Muntagirov, in the Grand Pas Classique, alongside other voices from across dance, including flamenco stars El Yiyo and Andrés Barrios.