Paul Lightfoot is a prolific, multi-award-winning British choreographer, more than 35 years in the industry, making dance as a duo with his former wife Sol León. Yet this is the first time their work has been performed by a British dance company. Seems hard to believe.
The pair spent their careers at Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT), as dancers and choreographers, then Lightfoot was artistic director from 2012 to 2020. But Cheshire-born Lightfoot trained at the Royal Ballet school, so this is a bit of a prodigal son situation, the Royal Ballet dancing an evening of the duo’s work: one two-decades-old piece revived, another that originated in lockdown that’s been dramatically recreated especially for this company.
The style of dance is so distinctive (influenced by that of NDT’s longtime director Jiří Kylián). It’s full of steps, exclamations, exaggerations and quirks. It is ultra specific, with constant switches of tone and timbre. The Royal Ballet’s dancers are used to demanding, ultra-contemporary movement but you can see how challenging it is to completely absorb a new style, and it’s interesting to see dancers play against type, like Vadim Muntagirov, a classical prince, now an ultra-serious, starkly angled figure in 2006’s Shoot the Moon. He’s one of five protagonists on a clever rotating set where different rooms and relationships come into view. Not so much a story as a set of (moderately opaque) situations. The style can be a bit Marmitey: Euro arthouse angst, well-dressed people in crisis to Philip Glass. Always a beautiful crisis, though.
The dancer most impressively invested in the work is Lauren Cuthbertson, almost reinvented for this piece. At one point there’s a live camera feed on stage and we see a closeup of Cuthbertson on screen, facial expressions as frantic as her body. She’s mesmerising, like a silent movie star scrolling through different roles – puffed cheeks, villainous pout – it could be comical if she weren’t so committed. The only thing is, there are so many expressions (and so many steps), it’s saying so much, that it almost doesn’t say anything; trying to tell a hundred stories, but sometimes one story is enough.
Reinvented for the Royal Ballet, Salle de Danse is an hour-long piece roughly based on the template of a ballet class, with a huge cast of dancers from across the ranks of the company. Titles of exercises are projected onstage – tendus, ronds de jambe, pirouettes – although often there’s only a cursory nod to the title step before heading off in another direction. Some of it gets samey; recognisable tropes recurring. But when there’s contrast, wow – especially a central section with the whole company in unison, moving their arms with the steely intensity of an archer taking aim. Plus the incongruous appearance of Francesca Hayward and Marcelino Sambé, sensual and slow, as if beamed in from a different ballet.