DANCE: Jann Parry in London
THE studio where the choreographer Ashley Page is rehearsing seems to be full of teenagers, their lankily graceful limbs swathed in a kind of innocence. In fact, the dozen or so dancers are in their early 20s, junior members of the Royal Ballet’s corps de ballet.
They look gorgeous, yet a couple of them seem slightly alarmed by what their bodies are doing. This isn’t surprising given that junior dancers’ duty is to stay in line, not to push themselves to the front of the stage. Of course this is frustrating since the reason they want to dance is to get under the spotlight. But the combination of this reticence, and hunger that results, is something that fascinates Page.
Though he’s just turned 40, he can still remember what it’s like to be “a desperate and anxious” kid. And it’s this dramatic tension between young and old dancers that he exploits in his new work Two-Part Invention.
Page has created the whole of the first section on nine junior dancers – a wave of the wand for those who’ve never even had their names printed in the programme before. It is set to a score by Robert Moran, 32 Cryptograms for Derek Jarman and it is geared to make the more compliant dancers take risks and generate power. Page has also deliberately taken the women off pointe in order get them to dance with even “more juice and physicality”.
Page chose Moran’s score – or says rather that “it jumped out” at him – because it “was obvious to dance to … it has the urgency of the best minimalist music”. But for the other section of the piece he’s used the much less obvious Prokofiev 5th Piano Concerto, because Two-Part Invention is a ballet of contrasts – of modern and classical, youth and experience. Part two is thus danced by older soloists and principals and its movement is, Page says, “more classical than anything I’ve done in a long while”, with the women in tutus and pointe shoes.
It is this opposition between the earth- bound and the classically airy that gives Page a wide palette to work with. But he also says, “When I heard Moran’s music it just said film to me”. So he’s had sections of the choreography filmed so that they can be shown with the live dancing, to add yet another layer of contrasts. This is typical of a choreographer who over the past 12 years has been putting ballet under pressure to see what new things it can reveal.
Though Page is a committed classicist – he loves the language of ballet – he has never taken it as he finds it. He sharpens and skews its lines, he re-works its syntax, fuses it with some of the qualities of modern dance and puts it in a recognisably modern world. Page represents the Royal’s cutting edge – he is the company iconoclast. When Page entered the company, both Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton were still alive and traditions – and pieties – were more sternly maintained.
These days a more contemporary, democratic spirit reigns, but one result may be that young dancers are less plugged into the past and more impatient to dance ballets of their own era.
Some critics argue, however, that there are increasingly few new ballets worth dancing. This summer a symposium held at the South Bank in London suggested that ballet has become an exhausted form clutching on to its past glories, with only a tiny minority like Page maintaining a toehold in the present. Page violently disagrees that the form itself is pass.
“I don’t think that ballet is a dinosaur, not as long as there are intelligent people around who want to use the language. All the period classics are textbook stuff now, but they didn’t start out that way and we won’t stay like that now.”