THE ILLUSTRATED "FAREWELL" / THE WIND / UNTOUCHABLE at Covent Garden

Time for another triple bill from the Royal Ballet, they do come round with some regularity and I know there is another due in April.  Although these all had individual moments, they did not hang together as a whole.

On reflection the one I enjoyed most was Twyla Tharp's THE ILLUSTRATED "FAREWELL" which builds on an earlier ballet she choreographed in 1973 set to Haydn's 'Farewell' symphony.  That work was called AS TIME GOES BY but only used the final movements of the symphony; when invited to work for the Royal Ballet for the first time since 1995, Tharp leaped at the opportunity to choreograph the first two movements of 'Farewell' to flow into the older ballet.

The ballet was, for me, the most thrilling as the opening was danced by the marvellous partnership of Steven McRae and Sarah Lamb whose dancing flows and complements each other beautifully.  Gravity-defying leaps, standing pivots and intricate 'pop' movements that showed their effortless synchronicity well.  As well as being excellent dancers, they also convey real personalities and connect perfectly with the audience.

The older work is introduced soundlessly by the whirling, swirling Mayara Magri who is partnered by Joseph Sissons (who we saw as the tapping Mad Hatter in ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND), and later groupings of five then ten dancers - with occasional appearances by Steven McRae and Sarah Lamb high above the stage, almost ghostly visions of the earlier music.  As I said, for the quality of pure dance, this was my favourite of the three.

Arthur Pita has only choreographed for the Royal Ballet's studio space so for his main stage debut he has gone for an "intimate epic" THE WIND.  Based in part on the original novel by Dorothy Scarborough and the Victor Sjostrom classic silent film which starred Lillian Gish, it certainly grabbed the attention but was over far too soon.  There was no character development and the plot climax was too garbled.  However I enjoyed it while I was watching it for Pita's stagecraft.

The ballet opened with the arresting image of billowing plastic sheeting blowing across the stage from massive jukebox-like fans which kept up the gale all through the act.  A ghostly-pale native American dances with and against the wind before ushering in the plot: young Letty arrives in a dust bowl western town - where the men are men and the sheep are frightened - and marries the taciturn and unemotional Lige. Letty was danced by the always extraordinary Natalya Osipova and she captured the uncertainty of a woman unable to fit into her environment.

Left alone by Lige, Letty is terrorized and later raped by the boo-worthy Wirt (the always-dependable Thomas Whitehead) and as she exacts her revenge on him, the constant howling wind finally snaps her grasp on reality and, watched by the mysterious figures of the native American and a bone-bleached frontier woman, walks into the howling night unafraid.

As I said, Osipova was enthralling as was Edward Watson as the ominous native American, but the piece was just far too short to get much involvement going and the large wind machines were just too modern and clunky for the period setting.  However special shout-out have to go to to the costumes by Yann Seabra which fluttered and whipped around in the constant gale and the lighting by Adam Silverman.

I certainly think I could take another chance to see THE WIND at some later date but hopefully they can find maybe 15 more minutes to allow for some engagement with the main role - maybe they could have trimmed some off Hofesh Shechter's interminable UNTOUCHABLE.  I am amazed it only ran 30 minutes, it seemed so much longer.  One cannot deny the talented 20 dancers onstage who moved in strict rhythm either en mass, as smaller groups or alone but, if truth be told, if I want to see a fascistic, militarist troupe go through their motions, I will watch Janet Jackson's video for RHYTHM NATION.

So there we are - one winner, one curiosity and one dud.  I don't suppose that's a bad batting average but I have seen more cohesive triple bills on the same stage, these three pieces simply didn't coalesce.  Maybe they need to roll the dice again and match them with other ballets?

KENNETH MACMILLAN Triple Bill at Covent Garden: 25 years on, the passion remains...

It's now 25 years since the choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan suffered a fatal heart-attack backstage at Covent Garden during a revival of his production MAYERLING and since that tragic event his ballets such as ROMEO AND JULIET, MANON, ANASTASIA, MAYERLING etc. have been revived and re-interpreted by a new generation of dancers in many different companies.  So when Kevin O'Hare, director of the Royal Ballet, saw the Northern Ballet production of ROMEO AND JULIET, it struck him how the upcoming 25th anniversary of his death should be on a wider scale than just his company.

With the agreement of MacMillan's widow Deborah, the season included the Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Northern Ballet, Scottish Ballet and the Yorke Dance Project coming together to give a nationwide appreciation of his enduring legacy.

Of the five events we selected the one which showed the range of MacMillan's choreography: the elegiac GLORIA, the thrilling and disturbing THE JUDAS TREE and the playful, colourful world of ELITE SYNCOPATIONS.

The first of the one-act ballets was MacMillan's GLORIA, premiered in 1980, which was danced by Northern Ballet.  It had been inspired the previous year when MacMillan watched the BBC series TESTAMENT OF YOUTH based on Vera Brittan's memoir of her experiences as a field nurse in World War I and in particular, the loss of her fiancée, her brother and their two best friends.  MacMillan was moved by her story and also by the memory of his father's involvement in the battle of The Somme which his father refused to talk about in the years after. 

He chose Francis Poulenc's Gloria in G Major as his music and the abstract choreography of the male and female dancers in a barren desolate landscape is counterpoint to the music's glorifying of God; it makes for a good distillation of the sacrifice of life against the vaunted ideals of what they were doing it for.  It was well danced but with no particular stand-out performances.

The second ballet was MacMillan's controversial THE JUDAS TREE from 1992, the last ballet that he completed for the Royal Ballet.  Set to an unsettling score by Brian Ellis, the ballet concerns the mysterious appearance of a scantily-clad woman on a London building site where a group of builders work like a dangerous, suspicious pack of animals. MacMillan's thrilling and highly-charged choreography is constantly shifting the power balance: one minute the woman is, literally, walking all over them as she delights in her female power over them but that changes on a toe-twirl to her being victimized by the men, the brutish foreman and his two young friends. 

One is always gentler with her and this ultimately leads to an explosion of violence in which the woman is beaten then gang-raped by the gang then murdered.  The quieter man, who did not take part in the wilding, tries to assimilate with the others but is rejected violently. In a sudden volte-face the foreman crawls along a crane arm and hangs himself where he is observed by the woman, her head covered Magdalene-like. The curtain-call felt like an almost grudging, muted ovation.  However it's power to rivet the attention cannot be denied and the committed performances by Thiago Soares as the Foreman, the remarkable Edward Watson as his gentle friend and, above all, the extraordinary Lauren Cuthbertson as the woman.

The final ballet was MacMillan's 1974 souffle ELITE SYNCOPATIONS, a set of party-piece routines danced to Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.  With eye-popping costume designs and the relaxed air of a cast party onstage, it was a delightful way to end the show and included guest soloists from Birmingham, Northern and Scottish ballets, with delightful turns from Laura Morera, Yasmine Naghdi, Ryoichi Hirano and Kevin Poeung.

But the troubled shadows of THE JUDAS TREE continued to linger in my mind and, although ELITE SYNCOPATIONS was a fine example of the lighter side of MacMillan's talent, THE JUDAS TREE is the one that will stay with me.  The 25th Anniversary season is over now but MacMillan's MANON will be at the Opera House next year.

WOOLF WORKS Works On Stage, Screen And CD... Living the past again

Nearly two years ago, we took the plunge - in the year of trying new things artistically - and went to Covent Garden to see WOOLF WORKS, a new Royal Ballet production choreographed by Wayne McGregor.  I remember feeling some trepidation... Virginia Woolf is one of my favourite authors for whom language is the key so how can you silence that but still make it relevant?  Two words... Wayne McGregor.

As you can see from my blog it had a profound effect on us both and it did indeed start a continuing exploration of ballet which has been very rewarding.  But how would the first revival of WOOLF WORKS compare - and would it have the same impact?

I am happy to be able to say that it led to a deeper, richer understanding of the work but also there was the added bonus this year of seeing it on the big screen at the Curzon Mayfair and also being able to appreciate the depth of Max Richter's music with it's release on cd.

Onstage we were blessed with practically the same cast as in 2015, the only major replacement being Calvin Richardson and his breathtaking pirouettes dancing the role of 'Evans' for the unwell Tristan Dyer in the MRS. DALLOWAY-inspired 'I Now, I Then'.  The impact of seeing the company onstage was made even more exciting by seeing the same dancers a few days later on the live cinema screening, giving an opportunity to experience their talent closer than possible at the Opera House although there was some loss too, in particular the glorious digital stage image of the garden of Clarissa's imagined youth flooding the set.

McGregor has choreographed three ballets in distinct styles: 'I Now, I Then' is the most narrative; based on MRS DALLOWAY - and introduced with the only known recording of Virginia Woolf musing on the difficulty of using old English words in new ways - we see Clarissa Dalloway (sublime Alessandra Ferri) meeting old flame Peter Walsh (Gary Aves) and relives the glorious summer she spent as a teenager with Peter and her best friend, the free spirited Sally Seton, and how life seemed full of possibility and choice.  The younger selves were danced wonderfully by Francesca Hayward, Federico Bonelli and Beatriz Stix-Brunell.

As Clarissa is lost in memories of what could have been we also see Septimus Smith (the astonishing Edward Watson) who is tortured with the lasting trauma of shell-shock from his experience in the WWI trenches.  His wife Rezia (Akana Takada) tries to keep him engaged in life but he is lost in memories of his friend Evans (Richardson) who was killed before him.  It is a perfect fusion of performance, choreography, design by Cigué, lighting by Lucy Carter - the moment the stage was suffused with glowing red when Septimus danced with Evans was glorious - and, almost a character of it's own, Max Richter's heartbreaking, longing music.

The second act 'Becomings' takes ORLANDO as it's inspiration and is the most abstract of the pieces although during one of the intervals for the screened event Wayne McGregor was interviewed by hosts Darcey Bussell and Clemency Burton-Hill and said he believed that no dance can be truly abstract as the human element will always lend a dance a narrative sense.  Again Lucy Carter's lighting is thrilling: an overhead beam roams the dark stage picking out 12 dancers in varying degrees of glittering gold Elizabethan costumes before a cold laser beam illuminates two of them and we launch into McGregor's take on Woolf's exploration of gender fluidity.

As Richter's music roams from bone-crunching electro beats to minimal keyboard runs so McGregor's choreography changes from solos to duets to triple routines for his remarkable dancers - pushing their limbs into even more challenging shapes and attitudes; the exhilaration is in seeing male and female dancers fusing into just pure dance.  With each segment, they slowly lose their Elizabethan costumes until they are in shades of grey, all dancing in and out of four overhead spotlights, all individual but all unified, until the lights cut out and the auditorium is criss-crossed with shafts of laserlight.  Again the live screening was wonderful to showcase in detail the astonishing work of, among others, Sarah Lamb, Natalia Osipova, Steven McRae and Watson.

The final act is TUESDAY and takes it inspiration from THE WAVES but also references Woolf's suicide note written on Tuesday 25th March 1941, three days before she actually drowned in the River Ouse.  McGregor has the inspired choice of Gillian Anderson reading the wrenching suicide note while a slow-motion film of crashing waves shows on a stage-wide screen all but dwarfing the stationary figure of Ferri beneath.  Anderson's measured, hypnotic delivery leads you in to McGregor's slow meditation on love and loss, beautifully danced by Ferri and Federico Bonelli who are later joined by Sarah Lamb and an ensemble which also includes young students from the Royal Ballet School.

Ferri is astonishing in her poetry and control as she becomes the embodiment of Richter's dreamlike, ethereal music, solitary notes slowly coming together with Anush Hovhannisyan's soprano to wash over you with waves of strings and brass.  There was one moment that haunts me: Alessandra Ferri starts a solo movement against the ensemble's choreography who slowly, three or four at a time, echo her until they are all bending and stretching as one, it's breathtakingly beautiful.  Slowly the ensemble ebb away into the darkness at the back of the stage, as Bonelli lowers a prone Ferri onto the stage as the music slowly vanishes note by note...

As I have said, the live screening was a wonderful opportunity to see the dancers closer than possible in the theatre and there were the added extras of interviews with Wayne McGregor and Max Richter as well as Maggie Smith reading passages from THE WAVES as well as Virginia's memoir MOMENTS OF BEING.

As I have written this I have been able to relive the experience by playing the cd THREE WORLDS of Richter's score; I wondered if it would work separately from the experience of seeing it with the dancers but it works beautifully.  It has been great to be able to explore this work in depth for the past two weeks - I would love the opportunity to see it again.

CHROMA / MULTIVERSE / CARBON LIFE at Covent Garden - Wayne's World

A week or so ago we returned to the Opera House Covent Garden, which is fast becoming a second home!  This time it was to see a triple-bill celebrating resident choreographer Wayne McGregor's 10th anniversary with the company; it centred on a premiere work MULTIVERSE and this was bracketed by two previously seen works CHROMA and CARBON LIFE.

McGregor's choreography is not always easy and he evidently wants to push the boundaries of the music that can be utilized for the Royal Ballet but his WOOLF WORKS was our entry point to the Royal Ballet so he will always be interesting to us.

CHROMA premiered in 2006 and in this revival McGregor has invited dancers from the Alvin Ailey company to join his Royal Ballet troop to bring their particular brand of dynamism; indeed the first two dancers seen are the hypnotic partnership of the delightfully-named Jeroboem Bozeman and Jacqueline Green who were quite amazing.  The company also included such stalwarts as Sarah Lamb, Federico Bonelli and Lauren Cuthbertson - the recent birth of a child might be good news for Steven McRae but sadly it robbed us of a chance to see his excellent dancing!  John Pawson's cool and formal set design and McGregor's intricate yet flailing choreography was danced to tracks by Joby Talbot and Jack White of The White Stripes, however they all sounded vaguely like attempts at writing James Bond car chase themes.  It was however a fantastic piece of dance theatre.

The premiere work MULTIVERSE sat in the middle of the evening and has not received the warmest reception.  It is an incredibly hard piece to like; admire possibly, but very hard to like.  It is set to two looped verbal works by the minimalist composer Steve Reich which were taken from a speech by an American black preacher in 1965 and called "It's Gonna Rain".  This phrase repeats and repeats, words are dropped, the phrase is multi-tracked starting at different moments to create a dense soundscape that batters against your ears.

Sadly - after a day of being on the phone listening to complaints from annoyed people - the preacher's multi-tacked rant left me ice cold and if I am honest, McGregor's choreography displayed all the characteristics of "modern dance" or to quote the legend that is Nicola Blackman, "six dancers running around trying to find the toilet with the light out".  Danced on a raked triangular stage, one could admire the commitment of the dancers who included Marianela Nunez, Eric Underwood and Edward Watson and towards the end, during the second Reich composition "Runner" from last year, there was finally some orchestral input and some interesting visual imagery, but by then I had disengaged from it.

It was with a suspicious heart that I took my seat for the last piece CARBON LIFE but here we were back to the McGregor we know: provocative, exciting and with a fluid sexuality.  CARBON LIFE premiered in 2012 and is danced to a score of Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt songs.  The music is played by an onstage band and a roster of singers - sadly absent was Boy George who had appeared in the premiere run four years ago but among the onstage singers was fellow-gayer Sam Sparrow.

Over nine songs the 18 dancers perform duets and small ensemble pieces, all with the signature McGregor moves of stretching, spinning, counterpoint movement and strong lines, but also clothed in the minimalist, futuristic costume designs of Gareth Pugh and lit by Lucy Carter's lighting design.  By the time of the last song "Somebody To Love Me" I was totally won over by McGregor's fusion of dance, pop music and fashion.  Ronson's songs sounded fantastic bouncing around the auditorium and all concerned are missing a trick not having the music recorded and available to buy.

I guess two out of three ain't bad - I would really like to see CHROMA and CARBON LIFE again.  Make it happen Covent Garden!

 

OBSIDIAN TEAR / THE INVITATION / WITHIN THE GOLDEN HOUR at Covent Garden

Another visit to the Opera House, Covent Garden?  Well don't blame me... they are the ones who keep putting shows on! *points*

The latest triple bill puts three one-act ballets together by three of the Royal Ballet's most popular choreographers - Wayne McGregor's new production OBSIDIAN TEAR, Kenneth MacMillan's haunting THE INVITATION and Christopher Wheeldon's hypnotic WITHIN THE GOLDEN HOUR.  All together they made for an involving evening of dance styles and storytelling.

It was Wayne McGregor's WOOLF WORKS that started the current love-in with the Royal Ballet so we were interested in seeing his latest creation OBSIDIAN TOUR.  It was certainly a haunting experience if a little too austere to launch the evening totally successfully.

Set on a darkened bare stage apart from a broad orange strip along the apron of the stage, nine male dancers in different designer trousers or shirt-dresses perform MacGregor's exacting choreography: tender and physically lyrical to violent and confrontational.  Slowly the dancers circle the one dancer wearing red and he is eventually thrown into the glowing red pit at the back of the stage.  Two dancers - Edward Watson and Matthew Ball - are left onstage before one of them too vanishes into the pit on the very last note of Esa-Pekka Salonen's eerie score.

The nine dancers were all remarkable in their concentrated energy and power with Watson, Ball and Calvin Richardson outstanding as the three main dancers.  It was great to have Salonen there to conduct the score and the moody, bare set was designed by Wayne McGregor too.

At 30 minutes it certainly didn't outstay it's welcome and I would like another opportunity to see it again but must say I found it's stark remoteness hard to concentrate on at the start of the evening.

We were on more traditional ground with the next piece, Kenneth MacMillan's controversial THE INVITATION which debuted in 1960, restaged here by Gary Harris. THE INVITATION was MacMillan's first Royal Ballet production to a commissioned score and he was urged to do it by the company's founder Ninette De Valois.  He chose the Hungarian-born composer Mátyás Seiber to collaborate with but Seiber was tragically killed in a car crash just before the premiere.

A young, impressionable girl leaves boarding school and returns to her mother's austere home.  There she meets her cousin and they both express their tender love for each other.  However their lives change when they are invited to a house party given by a married couple who know the girl's mother.  From their first meeting the husband is drawn to the girl's innocence.

The husband is bored with his clinging wife and after the night's entertainment lead to the guests indulging in sexual dalliances, the wife seduces the confused but willing cousin.  The girl, left alone with the brooding husband, playfully teases him but, misreading the situation, the husband attacks and brutally rapes her.  The cousin reappears but the girl withdraws fearfully from him, her illusions shattered forever. 

Ninette De Valois was upset that MacMillan had choreographed the rape onstage and suggested he put it offstage but he was adamant that this brutality was essential to the action and needed be seen by the audience and she eventually backed him in his decision. 

THE INVITATION still packs a hefty emotional punch largely due to MacMillan starting the piece almost dreamlike thanks to the late Nicholas Georgiadis gauzy set design allied with little moments of characterful humour.  But his choreography is brutally ugly and the last section of the ballet feels shattered and muted after it.

Yasmine Naghdi was perfect as the girl, starting so bright and full of life and ending up a shadow of a shattered being.  David Donnelly as the gauche cousin, Olivia Cowley as the neglected wife and particularly Thomas Whitehead as the husband were all excellent too.

The final ballet was Christopher Wheeldon's shimmering, abstract WITHIN THE GOLDEN HOUR which we first saw earlier this year in another triple bill.  Again I found Wheeldon's choreography remarably fluid and hypnotic with any number of bends, slides and pivots across the stage.  The climax where all 14 dancers are bobbing and weaving seamlessly together like a well-oiled machine was a giddy delight.

There are quite a few visits to Covent Garden coming up due to Owen going a bit mad for the upcoming season by the Bolshoi but towards the end of the year we have a triple bill of Wayne McGregor works including a brand new ballet.  Exciting times ahead!

CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON TRIPLE BILL at Covent Garden - Dance, dance, dance!

As you know Constant Reader, last year was the year of doing New Cultural Things and the winner was ballet - I honestly didn't see that one coming.  So here we are again, back at Covent Garden and ready to launch on this year's terpsichorean adventures!

One of last year's non-Covent Garden ballet events was seeing Christopher Wheeldon's CINDERELLA at the Coliseum which was a good introduction to his choreographic style but here we were, back in the impossibly glamorous Royal Opera House, to see a triple bill of his more challenging pieces.

The programme included a world premiere bracketed by two works Wheeldon choreographed for American companies which have now been added to the Royal Ballet's repertoire.  AFTER THE RAIN from 2005 was an abstract sliver of elegant loveliness danced to an achingly spare score by Arvo Part.  It started with two male and female dancers in grey/black costumes suggesting the swirling relentlessness of a rain storm but were wiped out of mind by the simple delicacy of Marianella Nunez and Thiago Soares in a glorious pas de deux seemingly welcoming the sun after the deluge, it, and they, were spellbinding.

I was excited to see the world premiere as it dealt with a favourite subject: John Singer Sargent's MADAME X, his infamous 1884 portrait of society beauty Amélie Gautreau.  American-born, Amélie married well in Paris and hired Sargent, the artist-of-the-moment, to immortalise her imperious beauty.  Sargent had her model in a black evening dress and painted her with one of the golden straps slipped off her shoulder.

 

The result was an instant scandal when the painting was displayed at that year's Salon - her imperious air and the suggestion of abandonment in her pose was deemed too shocking for the Parisians and their opprobrium was turned on both Sargent and Amélie.  Sargent heard that the Gautreau family wanted to buy the painting at the end of the Salon to destroy it so Sargent removed it and kept it in his studio, eventually repainting the offending shoulder strap to look more normal.  Sargent was too great an artist to be ostracised for long but Amélie's reputation was permanently ruined and she became a recluse in a house with no mirrors.  The reaction always struck me as bizarre when one assumes that the Salon also had it's usual number of artistic nudes which were deemed okay - but a misplaced shoulder strap....!

Ultimately I think STRAPLESS slightly missed it's target as the narrative had to put over too much through pure dance but the I enjoyed the fluidity of Wheeldon's choreography and in particular Bob Crowley's beautiful set and costume design which suggested the Belle Époque very well.  I particularly loved Crowley's version of the infamous black dress which swirled and whirled behind the ever-moving Amélie, restlessly pursuing Sargent until she was immortalised.

The main three performances were also excellent: Natalia Osipova was an imperious Amélie, spoilt and capricious until she is shunned by her peers, and she managed the final moments well, stripped and standing in front of her portrait, now surrounded by a 21st Century audience, but the woman herself is invisible to them.  Edward Watson gave us a suitably grave and haughty John Singer Sargent fascinated by the glamour of Amélie but drawn to a younger man, and Federico Bonelli was very seductive as Dr Pozzi, first seen in the pose that Sargent painted him, who is the conduit for Amélie to her painter.  I hope they stage it again in the future...

The last act was Wheeldon's 2008 ballet WITHIN THE GOLDEN HOUR which was an excellent showcase for his abstract choreography, his fourteen dancers seemingly floating, sliding, rising and falling again and again, and as the curtain slowly fell, they were circling and weaving, circling and weaving, movement flowing for ever...  It was a particular joy to see the male dancer we seemed to always see last year, Steven McRae, having the most extended pas de deux with Sarah Lamb.

It was another great evening at the Royal Opera House and I am looking forward to seeing Wheeldon's version of THE WINTER'S TALE there soon.  This triple bill - more than his CINDERELLA - has made me see what a fine choreographer he is.

Oh and by the way, what was my reaction to MADAME X?  Click here for my blog about the 2006 AMERICANS IN PARIS exhibition at the National Gallery to find out!

WOOLF WORKS: Moments of Being...

I was lost for words when Owen told me he had booked tickets for the Royal Ballet's WOOLF WORKS at Covent Garden.  I just couldn't grasp it... three short ballets based on MRS DALLOWAY, ORLANDO and THE WAVES?  How could this be?  What can there be of Woolf without her writing, it's rhythms and the power to connect moments of her life with ours.  How could this succeed robbed of her words?  It was with this air of quiet bafflement that I took my very good seat in that most sumptuously decadent of London auditoriums and the light lowered as the curtain raised...

Within seconds my central question was resolutely answered.  Virginia's voice sounded out, steady and strong in her only recorded piece for the BBC in 1937, talking about the difficulty with trying to find new forms of writing when English words are so over-familiar through being used again and again.  As we listened, her writing appeared on a screen, meshing and re-forming into a likeness of Virginia then coming apart again.  It was as if choreographer Wayne McGregor was saying that if words have lost their imaginative use then their must be other ways.

The first in the triptych was I NOW, I THEN based on the main characters in MRS DALLOWAY and the atmosphere and mood of the story.  Again after a few minutes not only did the penny drop but I found myself deeply involved.  This was helped by Lucy Carter's sombre lighting, the hazy video projections of London as seen through a dream and the striking set design of Cigué, 3 wooden oblongs that rotated slowly to open up new vistas and configurations, occasionally revealing a new dancer as if from nowhere. 

The hypnotic Alessandra Ferri, returned from retirement, danced the role of Clarissa Dalloway and as the title suggests, she was joined onstage by Francesca Hayward as the younger Clarissa who danced with Beatriz Stix-Brunell as the quicksilver Sally Seton and Gary Avis as the younger Peter Walsh, the older Peter was danced by Federico Bonelli.  Max Richter's intriguing score kept returning to the chiming of Big Ben, ticking clocks and watches, all suggesting Woolf's subject of time, the past and memory.

Edward Watson enthralled as he interpreted McGregor's disjointed choreography as the shell-shocked Septimus Smith partnered by Akane Takada as his despairing wife Rezia.  In a marvellous visual cue, the stage was bathed in a warm reddish light when he danced with Tristan Dyer as Evans, his dead friend from the trenches.

What was good about WOOLF WORKS was that each of the three sections felt totally different, the only connection being the source novelist.  Totally different in tone was BECOMINGS, the second of the three and based on ORLANDO.  Twelve dancers appeared on a darkened stage as an overhead spotlight searched them, their golden costumes gleaming as it swept around them as if trying to find a single person.  It finally alighted on one and the dancers soon started dancing in pairs, male and female, again suggesting Woolf's theme of gender confusion.

This was the longest of the three and it's abstract form did rather outstay it's welcome but what made it all the more thrilling was Richter's crunching music which at one point got so loud I actually thought the circle might give way!  The lighting was all very 80s with laser beams illuminating the dancers, suggesting the other-world space of Orlando's changing gender. The lasers swept into the auditorium too, lighting up each of the circles with beads of light and in a dramatic, sudden finale end with countless lasers firing all over the auditorium, just like the last Pet Shop Boys concert!  It was all very thrilling - and again not what I had expected.

After a second interval - each about the same length as the actual dance pieces themselves - oh and after a second wild strawberry champagne cocktail (I LIKE Covent Garden), it was time for the last of the three, TUESDAY (based on THE WAVES) as the curtain rose on a bare stage apart from a long screen on which a slow film of crashing waves played.  

Gillian Anderson was then heard reading Virginia's heartbreaking suicide letter to Leonard and, as usual when confronted with it, I soon had tears running down my face.  Beautifully read by Anderson and with nothing on stage to distract from the words it was incredibly powerful.  It affects for many reasons: the private nature of a suicide letter to a husband by a writer who always strove to find new ways of describing life, the sheer beauty of the writing even though the content is so tragic, that in describing all she knew she shared with Leonard was not enough to stop Virginia from doing what she did to end her losing battle with her insanity.

Alessandra Ferri was magnificent as the spirit of Woolf, painfully moving through her duet with Federico Bonelli, his attempts to hold her and keep her aloft ending with her escaping away, her sheer force of personality filling the auditorium.  They were joined on stage by children dancing with Sarah Lamb, again Ferri interacting with a dancer playing her younger self, for the children to vanish into an ensemble of dancers who filled the stage with slow, sinuous movement which culminated in Ferri joining them, at first moving on her own but slowly becoming one with their repeated moves, as if subsumed by the rhythm of the waves.

Slowly the ensemble pulled away, moving forward and back, forward and back as Richter's moving composition for strings reached it's climax as Bonelli carried Ferri for the last time to slowly lower her on to the stage to retreat away with the others.  It was powerful, emotional, impossibly moving.  She deserved every minute of her extended ovation, as indeed did her fellow dancers.

At the start of this year, Owen suggested that this should be a year of discovering new cultural things to see and on the back of this visit, Owen has indeed booked to see two more non-Matthew Bourne ballets.  I suspect however that nothing will come close to the emotional tour-de-force of Wayne McGregor's WOOLF WORKS.