Léa Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes at The Place

Léa Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes, The Place, February 12, 2022

Co-commissioned by The Place and presented there for a single night, Léa Tirabasso’s latest work, Starving Dingoes, follows thematically from her 2019 production, The Ephemeral Life Of An Octopus, but with a change of focus and a maturity of expression. Starving Dingoes is an unsparing meditation on the complex biological and physiological processes of life and death imagined through the cultural and emotional responses of the bodies in which they take place. The title comes from the choreographer’s memory of seeing a pack of dingoes on an Australian beach, here transposed to the feral aspect of existence called apoptosis or programmed cellular death — a natural phenomenon in which damaged cells are encouraged by internal processes to commit suicide to avoid impairing healthy cells. In merging cytology with the struggle for survival within the entire organism, Tirabasso has drawn on her collaboration with cancer researchers, Simone Niclou and Aleksandra Gentry-Maharaj. The issue Starving Dingoes raises is how, in an ongoing and cyclical process, the body deals with the presence of unhealthy ‘rogue’ cells that have lost their ability to die, leading to disease. While this meditation is highly personal, it is also timely to consider, by extension, how individuals within a given society co-operate or fight to ensure their own survival and that of the whole group. 

To engage with these questions, Tirabasso sets up a rich choreographic alchemy between the biological and the human, at times with pathos and at times with humour, without fully dissociating the two; it is the humbling humour of Starving Dingoes that makes its unexpected vision of life and death all the more accessible. The program describes the work as ‘a race for five dancers’ — Catarina Barbosa, Lauren Ellen Jenkins (substituting for Laura Patay), Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Alistair Goldsmith and Laura Lorenzi — ‘who explore the vital, albeit brutal, necessity to stay together’. This is the way we see them starting the work (under Nicolas Tremblay’s light) as five anthropomorphic cells inching forward very slowly like beached turtles (on Thomas Bernard’s fine cork-strewn shore) while singing a chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s nineteenth century opera, La Traviata, in their own protoplasmic language. But it is not long before dis-ease sets in both metaphorically and choreographically; bodies clash, disperse and reform in a constant effort to heal until the rogue cell is identified and killed. It is like a diagnosis through the intrinsic wisdom of sensation rather than through rational observation. What is counterintuitive is that at the heart of this process is compassion: the image of Goldsmith succouring the other four is remarkable for its communal inter-dependency as part of this regenerative cycle. 

In Verdi’s time, a ‘traviata’ was a ‘woman who has gone astray’, so the association of this particular opera to rogue cells in the body is uncannily pertinent. The biological imperative of the science is imbued with the melodramatic impact of the opera in such a way that Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes creates deep ties between the two and enriches both. Johanna Bramli’s and Ed Chivers’s all-embracing score, which splices into its rumbling bass drone and electrical short-circuits Verdi’s sampled arias and choruses — as if we are hearing the opera from inside the body — adds to the atavistic, emotional resonance of the work. Unlike in the opera, where actions are decided through the volatility of emotions, the performers of Starving Dingoes embody processes that are emotionally blind, but this is where the power of the work’s juxtaposed layers exists. As part of her choreographic path, Tirabasso sought the expertise of Gabrielle Moleta who gave the performers a one-day workshop in animal transformation to train the body beyond familiar habits and traditions (it could go further as there are still traces of self-consciousness in the performance), but the effect on the language of the action is transformative. Seeing the performers wrestle for their communal health against Brekke’s rogue pathology while each sings Violetta’s final aria is to take opera and dance to profoundly cathartic levels.

Tirabasso and her team have done something more than create a show that in our precarious cultural climate may be seen in a handful of venues; I hope it receives much more attention for its performative qualities and the themes it conveys. Having got this far with such conceptual vigour and emotional urgency, Starving Dingoes deserves to have access to a further line of funding so that its full potential can be realised. But even more, the concept appears ripe for large-scale operatic treatment, a production of La Traviata, perhaps, as seen under the microscope that draws down the emotional heights of melodrama into the depths of physical survival. It could even become, if it hasn’t already, an allegory of our time. 

Ian Abbott on Outdoor performances in 2021: Part 1

Due to the interrupted possibilities of seeing indoor work across 2021, I will focus predominantly in this two-part review on work presented in England’s green and pleasant land, the great outdoors. When the UK government released their four-stage roadmap for loosening Covid restrictions in February 2021, stage three approved the return of outdoor performances as of May 17, allowing audiences once again to see live work in person. Norwich and Norfolk Festival were fresh out of the blocks, running from May 17 to 30, stating that the ‘2021 edition of the arts festival will be a one-off adaptation, with programme and presentation designed especially for Covid times.’ To celebrate the first festival of the 2021 outdoor arts season I ventured to Norwich to see the premieres of three new dance works by Alleyne Dance, Requardt and Rosenberg and Far From The Norm.

Future Cargo by (Frauke) Requardt and (David) Rosenberg was originally planned and advertised to premiere at Greenwich and Docklands International Festival (GDIF) in 2020, but instead landed in Chapelfield Gardens in mid-May on a rainy Norwich evening at 6pm for around 100 audience members. This is how it describes itself: “A truck arrives in Silvertown from a distant planet. As the sides roll up, an unstoppable series of events are set into motion. This contemporary sci-fi dance show reveals a world where the normal rules don’t apply. This extraordinary new outdoor production takes audiences into a surreal visual and aural experience enhanced with 360-degree sound on personal headsets.” 

Future Cargo is actually a cross between the conveyor belt challenge on the Generation Game and a space crematorium — all set on the back of an articulated lorry with bespoke shipping container and treadmills a plenty — as four skin-tight, silver morph-suited performers parade and attempt to escape the inevitable furnace of death. The opening twenty minutes see the chrome morphs ice skate in slow-motion as they continuously adopt multiple mannequin stretches and choreographic poses in both solo and duet encounters before the gradual inclusion of props designed to pique our visual interest in the treadmill conceit: tennis racquets, plants, a very long bench, a water cooler, a bowling ball and ten pins, wigs, combs and dodgems. There is also a truck driver who spends most of their time in the cab before climbing on to the top of the container towards the end only to switch places with one of the silver bodies. 

Having seen all of Requardt &Rosenberg’s four previous works — Electric Hotel, Motor Show, The Roof, and DeadClub — they share a clear aesthetic, and a production prowess (courtesy of set and costume designer Hannah Clark and lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth) in which we are connected to the spoken words and music via a set of headphones with a binaural sound design and composition by Ben and Max Ringham. All have a similar thematic field that is being ploughed, but each one is dressed in different clothes. 

If you think of Future Cargo as season five of Requardt and Rosenberg rather than as an individual isolated work, then things begin to make a little more sense; we’re deep into the narrative arc where distance, proximity and intimacy have all been repurposed. Setting aside the awkward season two that was Motor Show, the new(ish) feature for this season is that there’s treadmills and a shipping container in play. I say the shipping container is new, but Rosenberg has another creative partnership with Glenn Neath called Darkfield where together they have produced three 20-minute works in customised shipping containers that audiences enter; they’re pitch black and the work is experienced through sound, scent and haptic encounters.

Throughout May I was also watching the three seasons of Dark (a German language sci-fi series commissioned by Netflix and created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese) which explores the existential implications of time in 33-year cycles, intergenerational time travel and its effect on human nature. It’s all about loops, black holes, repeated lives and making decisions which might or might not impact what happens to us in the future. Dark definitely had an impact on my reading of Future Cargo and the synchrony that exists between the two works; they fed and enhanced each other. When I was watching these chromed bodies disappear off stage left on the truck and heard a whoosh in the soundtrack leading us to believe that the bodies are being flamed, I was also seeing the burnt eyes and burst eardrums on the characters from Dark.

The visual field of Future Cargo is highly controlled and very limited; as an audience experience it’s akin to watching TV. You’re fixed in a single position, watching something play out in front of you at some distance; there’s very rarely more than one thing to watch at once and the majority of it plays out in front of you in a narrow rectangle of constantly evolving moving shapes. Future Cargo is visual dopamine, designed for Instagram likes and contains short-form choreographed nuggets that are perfect for the Tik Tok TV generation.

Good Youtes Walk (commissioned by GDIF) by Far From The Norm was presented in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral and self-describes as a “chaotic and frenzied Hip Hop dance theatre work” that “explores how divided we are as a nation. Due to the recent surge of global events including the Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement heightening, now more than ever we are a nation divided. It unravels how the youth of today are reclaiming their future and want to address the divide by creating unity and empathy that transcends race, class, gender and geography.”

In June, when Glastonbury 2021 was a screen-based encounter due to the restrictions on numbers of people who could gather, Kano performed a “career-defining” 35-minute set at Worthy Farm that was joyous, complex and political, demonstrating an artist at the top of their game. Good Youtes Walk Amongst Evil is a song by Kano (released in 2019) and the first lyric is: “We’re doing this for the money”.

Premieres are strange things; they are the first public outing of a work on a date that is often determined by a presenter. Good Youtes Walk was simply not ready to be out in the world. At 40 minutes long it was flabby, had over-stretched ideas outstaying their welcome, energies that sagged between choreographed sections and if you compare the reality of what it claims to be versus reality, it felt thin and flimsy. 

Set on a static lump of a structure that looked like a decaying building (designed by Ryan Dawson Laight), the five dancers attempted to deliver a series of episodic scenes, interspersed with tightly choreographed norm dancing that flips boomer perception of the good/bad binary of what the  “youth” are up to on the street; they tried to goof around and aim their water pistols at political satire with a Boris Johnson-esque character, cheap props, wigs (by costume maker, Kingsley Hall), fishing rods with fake money as bait, superhero masks and inept police officer chases. The FFTN dancers (Amanda Pefkou, Hayleigh Sellors, Jordan Douglas, Shangomola Edunjobi and Ezra Owen) are incredible dancers. They’re not trained clowns, actors and comedians, so why would you attempt to make a work of this length with a limited creation and rehearsal period, asking the dancers to try and deliver all of these other skills on top?  

We know that since the Conservative party came to power in 2010 the real-term spending to youth services has been cut by over 70% in less than a decade; we know that there are so few public spaces designed for teenagers and we know that if you were born after the year 2000 you have only known an England that is suffering the effects of a financial crash, over a decade of Conservative rule and now a pandemic. Young people have only known this state; this is their norm.

I’m unsure whether Good Youtes Walk is Far From The Norm embodying and wholly owning the opening lyric from Kano; after all, a company has a duty of care to those it employs, people need to be paid and which company is going to turn down a sizeable commission in these pandemic times? After the premiere, I don’t know if there was any more time spent re-working it before further dates in the summer, but I cannot say the same for Good Youtes Walk that I did for Far From The Norm’s full-length BLKDOG I saw at Warwick Arts Centre in February 2020: that I’d be happy to meet that work again at a later date to see how it had settled. I’ll share some new thoughts on BLKDOG in the second part of this review.

Bonded by Alleyne Dance was an absolute highlight of 2021; it warrants a much larger tour in 2022 and beyond and demonstrates a rare trinity of conceptual simplicity, refined craft and expert delivery. The work self-describes as “an outdoor production that explores the construct of human dependency, especially that of siblings — and how time and external conditions can affect the synergetic connection. Performed by twin sisters, Kristina and Sadé Alleyne, the work takes the audience through a transitional journey of inter-and-independency through abstract dance narrative.” 

Our thirst for human touch has been foregrounded since March 2020 and although Bonded isn’t a COVID work, it was made during these times. Whilst the use of “synergetic” and “inter-and-independency” in the marketing copy may lead us to believe this is a slightly dry and academic performance, it is anything but. 

At a shade under 30 minutes, we’re introduced to Kristina and Sadé who are alone on either side of a revolving, 8-metre long, narrow, transparent corridor; they encounter this physical barrier (designed by Emanuele Salamanca) which restricts their ability to touch and be together. They begin to mirror movements on either side of it — lighting up our mirror neurons that are enhanced by their visual similarity as twins — until the corridor begins to rotate which forces them to move, inhabiting a space that the other was just in, but the body is no longer there. The corridor and choreography begin to transform and transform again in many and unexpected ways offering encounters on alternate levels, new restrictions to overcome and eventually leading to them being reunited. All of these moments of being apart and facing restrictions before finally coming together were empathetically landing because that had been the lived reality for so many of us before May 2021. 

Kristina and Sadé are exceptional performers who describe the Alleyne Dance style as “blending West-African, Caribbean, Kathak, Hip Hop and Circus Skills within a contemporary dance context” and over the past decade they’ve worked for a suite of international choreographers including Wim Vandekeybus, Akram Khan, Gregory Maqoma, Alessandra Seutin and Boy Blue. However, what is remarkable is that Bonded is the first outdoor performance they’ve created and performed as Alleyne Dance (they were commissioned by 2Faced Dance Company to create Power in 2019). For an outdoor work to be so well crafted, that demonstrates an understanding of how story beats are released to sustain an audience’s attention and how they combine with a structure and score that enhances the conceptual understanding is a massive achievement and heralds an exciting arrival onto the outdoor arts circuit.

Reflections on other work from the great outdoors across in 2021 will continue in part 2.

Curated by Carlos, Birmingham Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells

Curated by Carlos, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells, November 4

The Birmingham Royal Ballet program at Sadler’s Wells is titled Curated by Carlos, a branding that links the identity of the company to the personality and reputation of its new artistic director, Carlos Acosta. One of the selling points of the program is a ‘new duet’ with Acosta and Alessandra Ferri, but the solipsistic branding and the promotional focus on Ferri hardly constitute Acosta’s unqualified confidence in the image of the company he now leads. Uncannily, the effect of the three works he has curated, by Spanish and Latino choreographers, also serves to downplay the individuality of his dancers and promotes instead a uniformity that effaces them. 

The company metamorphosed from the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, settling in Birmingham in 1990, a city with a burgeoning cultural life that already counted Simon Rattle and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as one of its calling cards. The term ‘levelling up’ had not been invented at the time but BRB’s change of home was part of a politically favoured redistribution of cultural assets. As an art form, ballet is independent of its home city, but the company’s presence and achievements bring the city reflected pride and prestige in the way the late Pina Bausch gave the industrial city of Wuppertal an international reputation. Acosta has brokered a more direct relationship with Birmingham by offering a dutiful gesture of appreciation to the city in the first work on his triple bill, City of a Thousand Trades co-directed by choreographer Miguel Altunaga and dramaturg Madeleine Kludje, currently the associate director of Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Its title is taken from a nineteenth century description of the city at a time when immigration and industry spurred its enormous growth. The multinational cast of BRB already acts as a proxy for immigration, but Giulia Scrimieri’s set focuses uniquely on construction as the representative industry; scaffolding poles and wheeled wooden forms become the city’s leitmotif, handled throughout with balletic grace. The co-direction effectively divides the work’s focus: Kludje celebrates the value of the city’s individuals shaped by oral histories and recorded poetry by Birmingham Poet Laureate, Casey Bailey, while Altunaga celebrates the city’s homogeneity through the value of a corps de ballet. Mathias Coppens’ score serves both approaches but cannot unite them. City of a Thousand Trades is studious in its reverence but fails to deliver the kind of spontaneous reward for which the city might be remembered.

Daniela Cardim’s Imminent, to a lush but emotionally predictable score by Paul Englishby, starts from an existential questioning about the role of the individual in a society affected by calamitous environmental and political issues. With help from dramaturg Lou Cope, Cardim has extruded these questions into an abstract balletic form with Eilis Small as the individual in a flock of classically trained dancers in tunics for whom the answer to everything is either an arabesque or a pirouette. Only April Dalton’s set — a backdrop of white papier-mâché cliffs inset with an incongruous hinged door — gives any kind of direction to the work: a choice for the dancers of either passing through the open door into the mysterious light of the unknown or remaining in the comfort of unknowing. Some do, some don’t. It’s all a bit banal and underwhelming, questioning less the role of the individual conscience in society than the relationship between choreographer and dramaturg. 

Goyo Montero’s Chacona is evidently designed to be the ballast that will anchor the entire program. Choreographed to a full-blooded transcription by Ferruccio Busoni of Bach’s Chorale Prelude No. 3 and to three instrumental interpretations of the chaconne from Bach’s Partita No.2 in D Minor, Montero’s opening geometric corridor of dark-clad bodies sculpted in light has the brooding suggestion of a clandestine obsession. Imposed on the rectangular geometry of the dancers is a triangle with musicians at each apex: pianist Jonathan Higgins and a Steinway grand at the back with Robert Gibbs on violin and Tom Ellis on classical guitar on either side. Into this muscular environment Montero introduces the lithe Alessandra Ferri for a brief appearance with Acosta as her partner but they have no influence on the complex choreographic monolith that engulfs them; Ferri’s appearance and artistry are subsumed into the shadowy darkness of the stage. No sooner do they appear than we start to wonder where she and Acosta have gone; this is the reality of the much-hyped duet, a short interpolation that Montero has deftly concealed within his original construction. While it leaves the choreography intact the company recedes into its oppressive, sometimes brutal embrace. 

Dance Umbrella 2021: Dimitris Papaioannou’s Transverse Orientation

Dimitris Papaioannou, Transverse Orientation, Sadler’s Wells, October 21

Dimitris Papaioannou, whose new production, Transverse Orientation, was presented at Sadler’s Wells as part of Dance Umbrella 2021, might well agree with the late photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo who noted that, “Down here everything is symbol and mystery.” Papaioannou, who trained in the visual arts, has made his reputation by presenting symbols and mysteries for the three-dimensional stage. In addition to his 8 performers, he has an extraordinary team to help him, with set designers Tina Tzoka and Loukas Bakas, lighting designer Stephanos Droussiotis, costume designer Aggelos Mendis, props constructor Nectarios Dionysatos, and mechanical inventor Dimitris Korres. Dance Umbrella presented The Great Tamer in 2018, in which Papaioannou introduced a complex array of theatrical images that referenced a trajectory from Greece’s ancient heritage to NASA’s landing on the moon, harnessing his powerful graphical theatre to an overriding theme of cultural archaeology. Transverse Orientation anticipates a future archaeology by mapping the effect of human intervention on natural environments. The irony of the title, which refers to the nocturnal moth’s evolutionary method of travel, is that moths are notnaturally attracted to a bright light; they are deceived by it. Their evolved nocturnal navigation system is short-circuited by anything brighter than moonlight to the point of paralysis and potential death by predators.

Tzoka and Bakas present a bleak, almost two-dimensional stage with a long back wall, a fluorescent light fixture high on one side and a door flush with the wall on the other. The stillness is charged with dramatic possibility until the light crackles into action and the door opens to a small swarm of anonymous, two-legged arthropod figures in black carrying a ladder. Seen in silhouette, this ballet of frenzied walks and gestures is a masterpiece of comic exaggeration and surreal invention (one of the moths — Breanna O’Mara — returns later to do a rousing tap routine). 

When Emma Gladstone asked Papaioannou in the post-show talk about his creative process he narrowed his response to describing the constraints of a deadline on both the period of creation and on the shaping and editing of the material into an integrated performance. But for someone like Papaioannou who delights in creating work as a palimpsest of imagery derived equally from ancient mythologies, renaissance art, and surrealism, the choice of what images to gather and how to place them in his theatrical universe must correspond at times to the attraction of moths to a bright light. 

This is an essentially existential metaphor that could relate both to the creative process and to the ideas around which the images are circling. In the opening section of Transverse Orientation, Papaioannou illustrates this metaphor with sardonic wit, making us laugh with him as his moths teeter precariously around a light source that is subject to electrical and mechanical failure. But then he subjects us (literally) to a powerful, roving search light that temporarily blinds us, a theatrical sleight of hand introducing us to more familiar territory: a colossal bull tamed and nurtured by a naked man and giving birth to a woman who is then carried away naked on the bull’s back. While Papaioannou is not averse to reusing visual imagery from his creative storehouse, he uses it here under a different light. The young woman (O’Mara) may reference Europa whom Zeus, disguised as a bull, abducted to Crete, and the young woman in her dotage (Tina Papanikolaiou) returns movingly to see what has become of her namesake. While Europe may be at a critical juncture in its history, its political situation pales into insignificance in the face of the current climate emergency. Two further images link the allegory of the moths to Papaioannou’s depiction, in drawn-out theatrical time and space, of the current environmental crisis. The door in the back wall opens on to a solid wall of granite blocks. They begin to force their way through the door seemingly of their own volition, an interminable stream of earthquake debris along with the odd surviving body. The bodies then pile up the rubble on the side of the stage and leave it there, a mere inspiration for acrobatic games. In the final image the goddess of abundance tips her bucket of water on to the stage while slowly descending beneath it. More water is poured on to the stage while the performers rip up the floor sections and scatter them on either side. Standing in the water is a man with a bucket and mop, acutely aware of his own inadequacy. 

What started off as parody has turned by degrees and digressions to darkest satire.

Normal Conditions/Nicola Conibere in Carareretetatakakers

Normal Conditions, Nicola Conibere, Carareretetatakakers, Lilian Baylis Studio, October 14

When a word is repeated faster and faster or fed through an electronic sampler, its sound can become dissociated from its original meaning through a process known as semantic satiation. It certainly happened to the title of Nicola Conibere’s new work, Carareretetatakakers, presented in her debut at the Lilian Baylis Studio on October 14. In a recorded section where the word ‘caretaker’ is repeated and sampled, the audible stretch covers a relatively anodyne ‘characters’ to what sounded like ‘kerry terriers’ and even ‘hairy dentist’. Just as the sampled sound of the word makes us wonder what we are hearing, the linear progression of Carareretetatakakers questions what we are seeing and, by extension, how we can understand the very notion of ‘taking care’. 

As we enter the triangular space with seating on its three sides, three performers — Helka Kaski, Annie Hanauer and Adrienne Ming — are already communing in a casual physical groove with Duncan MacLeod’s score of electronic bleeps. Lucille Acevedo-Jones’s costumes with large ruffled collars in shades of green, blue and lilac with matching smudges of lipstick have connotations of reptilian beings, where the calculated insouciance and concentrated immersion of the trio in their movement make our attendance feel superfluous. This technique of task-based choreography can have the effect of alienating an audience from the notion of performance, which may be its purpose; to place it at the beginning of a work is both a bold statement and a risky proposition. In the freesheet offered as we exit the theatre there is an example of a task called Multipoints that may well have been used to generate the opening sequence: ‘Find 3 points in your body, say one in your shoulder, one in your hip, and one in your knee. Let’s call them 1,2 & 3. Find 3 metronomes…set each to a contrasting rhythm, called a, b & c. Try to get point 1 to pulse to rhythm a. And point 2 to rhythm b. And point 3 to rhythm c. Try to do them all at the same time.’ 

Because Kaski, Hanauer and Ming are seasoned, charismatic artists, the effect of these shared circadian rhythms is hypnotic; there is neither self-consciousness nor pretension in their performance. Developing additional tasks that bring into play their musicality, idiosyncratic ways of moving and sense of humour, they lead us on through choreographic notions of support and care towards an expected apotheosis that will validate both the work and our presence. But Conibere has other ideas, ones that pull the theatrical mat from under our feet without ever letting on that this is her aim. As we can read in another section of the freesheet mystifyingly entitled “Meat/Yam juices on foil”, ‘How can we discover an inefficient movement vocabulary? How can we work with inefficient and wasteful choreographic structure? What would they mean, look like and do?’ And in response, ‘We discovered: multiple ways to deliberately disrupt, to frustrate to refuse flow. (We then noted how many very different forms of dance are nonetheless defined by flow). That expressions of stuttering and awkwardness and stalling offer forms for imagining relation differently.’

This last observation is significant, because it supports a gestural approach to communication that, while designed to be used performatively in a theatrical setting, is close to social life outside the theatre. The destabilization of Carareretetatakakers is that it undermines the notion of going to the theatre for entertainment (one audience member evidently realised this early on and walked out) and yet fulfils the notion of theatre as a mirror of the society in which we live. ‘Stuttering, awkwardness and stalling’ could be considered all the more relevant during the speculative opening up of society in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. Confidence and flow are in short supply. 

What the three performers nevertheless achieve — and offer as an effective antidote — is the cohesion of their relation; theirs is a conspiracy of collusion that leads them to encourage and support each other, the essence of taking care as performative ethics. The dance training of each — Hauer in ballet, Ming in jazz and Kaski in contemporary dance — is a metaphor for difference, but the inspiration they express through these forms, however deconstructed, becomes the way the three interact with, overlap and sustain each other.  

The structure of Carareretetatakakers, from its use of triangular space to MacLeod’s musical collage of classical and jazz quotes over a metronomic beat, to its choreographic stuttering, awkwardness and stalling, all indicate that Conibere has set out not to indulge the audience. And yet, in her choice of cast, she has harnessed her structure to human values that transcend it.  

Shobana Jeyasingh Dance, TooMortal, Saint Pancras Church, September 24

Shobana Jeyasingh Dance, TooMortal, Saint Pancras Church, September 24

For a site-specific choreographic work like Shobana Jeyasingh’s TooMortal, conceived as a dance work for historic churches, the site itself is as much the subject as the choreography. Commissioned by the Venice Biennale, London’s Dance Umbrella, Stockhom’s Dansens Hus and Belgrade’s BITEF Festival within the European Network of Performing Arts (ENPARTS), TooMortal was first performed in St. George’s Anglican Church in Venice in 2012. Jeyasingh was attracted to a feature common to the churches in which TooMortal played: the box pew, designed for 17th and 18th century protestant services as an enclosed place in which family groups could listen to the sermon. In England, the Victorian proclivity for updating churches very often led to box pews being ripped out in favour of the open variety. London’s Saint Pancras Church, designed in 1819 in the Greek Revival style by William Inwood and his son, Henry William, was one of the last London churches to have box pews and one of the few to retain them. It was in this glorious interior that the 20-minute TooMortal was presented on September 24th. 

The sound of a single bell leads us into the church and into Cassiel’s sound installation, while the symbolism of Yaron Abulafia’s lighting, with its triangulation of the interior space made sculptural through a dense haze, imposes itself on our sensibility as we stand in the chancel looking down the nave at the rows of box pews that have become effectively a sectioned, three-dimensional stage. The choreographed space nevertheless remains close to its religious function, mediating between the tangible aspect of social life — more notable after the pandemic’s long period of enforced isolation — and the contemplation of mortality.  

At first the 12 dancers remain hidden inside their respective pews until the music summons them to emerge as if rising from the grave of their circumscribed fate. With each dancer in matching red dresses by Ursula Bombshell in each of six symmetrical pews arranged equally on either side of the nave of the church, TooMortal weaves together its constituent elements to map a contrapuntal journey of heavenly aspirations driven by a remix of James MacMillan’s Tenebrae Responsories that Cassiel has incorporated into his soundscape. The religious nature of the musical subject further enriches the sense of ecclesiastical space while giving the choreography the rhythmic pulse of steam turbines that gradually fragment into heavenly voices. 

Jeyasingh delves into the rich emotional states of her dancers to fuel this philosophical exploration of containment, both in social and religious terms. The pews are deep, so the focus of the choreography often appears to be from the waist up, a locus of emotional and intellectual processes. Integrated into this broad range of physical expression — from unbridled rage to concentrated meditation — are fleeting visual elements of Christian iconography like the horizontal pose of a crucifixion that reinforce the nature of the site while eliciting in the observer a metaphysical response of introspection and solace.

Soon after seeing TooMortal, I came across a dissertation by Lisa Marie Bowler on Theatre Architecture as Embodied Space, in which she writes, ‘The purpose of site-specific or immersive theatre work is often to destabilise any notion of a fixed social reality even further, by negotiating and reconfiguring how these spaces are used.’ Uncannily, such destabilization is evident in TooMortal through its many inversions: between the vertical aspiration of faith and the horizontal aspect of the performance; between the predominant patriarchy of the Church and the all-female cast; between the placement of the congregation and the altar, and between the sombre weight of the architecture and the lightness and fury of the dance. And given the nature of the site, which inherently invokes the historical past, the quality of the live performance is very much in the present as we watch the dancers in their finite space manifesting an all-consuming desire to transcend their physical boundaries. Sometimes confrontational, sometimes lost in their own suffering, they nevertheless seem moved by an intractable but invisible hand. Only towards the end do they make physical contact with each other, tentative at first but then interlocking over the pews, gestures of solidarity and love. The dancers never confront the audience; they are embroiled with each other in their own existential preoccupations as if we were not present. At the end, they stand with their gaze fixed on the infinite as if their identities had departed, and as the light and music fade, we see these corporeal Wilis slowly descend into the oblivion of their wooden tombs. 

Thomas Page Dances, A Moment

Thomas Page Dances, A Moment, Filmed at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, July 3

In writing the play, Moment of Grace, in 2018, Bren Gosling distilled the stories of three characters whose lives were irrevocably linked through the AIDS pandemic in the UK of the 1980s. Because Gosling was close to people affected — he dedicated the play to the memory of Shane Snape — he was able to incorporate his insights into the psychological stance of each character that allows us to better understand the socio-political environment in which they experienced the disease. The play deals with fear, loss, disgrace, shame and friendship as the scourge of AIDS began to impact the gay community through misinformation and rank prejudice and is based on a historic occasion, the opening in April 1987 by Diana, Princess of Wales, of Britain’s first dedicated AIDS unit at London Middlesex Hospital. In the version I saw, filmed in the first lockdown, Gosling mixes his script with archive video of Diana’s much mediatised visit in which she openly shook hands with nurses, doctors and one of the patients, which did much to counter the misinformation and prejudice around the spread of AIDS. The title’s ‘moment of grace’ links the defiance of Diana’s handshake with the courage of one of the consultants to admit, in conversation with the princess on live television, that he too had AIDS. 

When Gosling suggested to choreographer Thomas Page that he respond to Moment of Grace, the idea was to present both his play and the choreographic response as a double bill. “I am very interested as a writer in collaboration with other creative forms. Also, I wanted to open a dialogue between older and younger generations of LGBTQ people about the English AIDS pandemic. Art is always great for opening up dialogue.” 

Even though Page describes the work on his website as “two performers explor[ing| what it was to be gay in the 80s when the UK was full of fear and ignorance”, is it possible — borrowing from R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience — to know the experience of another, let alone the experience of another forty years ago? Art, it seems, can only make marks on a surface or in space that point to that experience while the audience is left to reconstruct those marks and pointers in their own mind, to distil an emotion of what that original experience might have been. In this sense, A Moment is very much an exploration in movement by the two performers, Page and Llewelyn Lewis, of what it is to be gay today, at a time and in a society where homosexuality is more accepted, and, thanks to antiretroviral drugs, AIDS is no longer a death threat.

The setting of a bare stage under Rachel Luff’s moody lighting and Robert Singer’s evocative score gives A Momenta sense of existing on a raised dais floating in time. An arresting image draws us down to a domestic scene in which Lewis stands centre stage, fully clothed, in an overhead cone of light, repeating the close, enveloping gestures of one taking a shower. Repetition — a choreographic motif favoured by Page — etches the image in our memory while suggesting the languor and routine of the everyday. It is only interrupted by rising side lights signalling Page’s entrance into the space, coming to rest with one foot on one of the many items of clothing scattered around. The presence of clothes responds to a line in Gosling’s play spoken by Andrew as he looks back at his life: “I used to be interested in clothes, clubs, buying records. And men. Now my life…what life?” For Andrew and others in his position the desire for gratification must have seemed so insignificant in the face of death, but for Page and Lewis the clothes seem by contrast to be casual attachments, choices to wear or abandon. Page describes the ensuing duet as ‘moving through themes of paranoia, intimacy and oppression’, but his seismic palette has few ups and downs, few moments in which transitions from one emotion to another are clearly established. To adapt daily movement to the stage as a communicative structure to relay ideas and emotions requires a choreographic vocabulary that has the clarity of language in visual form. Page’s response to Gosling’s play is more an open-ended reverie between two men that softens the contrast between the themes it purports to address, as if Gosling’s social concerns have been replaced by Page’s existential ones. It will be interesting to see the live pairing of the two, as was intended, as an indication, perhaps, of how far the present LGBTQ+ community has developed from the initial AIDS crisis and how much it owes to those who endured it. 

(The two works premiered together at the 2018 Bloomsbury Festival but were transferred during lockdown to the screen, the format in which I saw them).

KVN Dance Company’s Coppelia at The Cockpit Theatre

KVN Dance Company, Coppelia, The Cockpit Theatre, September 2

In 1934, Adrian Stokes wrote about the relationship between action and music in ballet: “The action does not interpret the music, nor the music the action. They would appear to belong to different atmospheres. Yet they cannot be held apart, since the picture they compose is unforgettable.” This is very much the impression of the opening night of KVN Dance Company’s Coppelia at The Cockpit Theatre. Here the ‘different atmospheres’ include the costumes, sets and lighting, each on their individual layers of experience, that combine with the cast to create a high-octane performance that is in turn heightened by the proximity of the audience to the action.  

This is not a revival of the already much revived Coppelia choreographed in 1870 by Arthur Saint-Léon to a score by Léo Delibes, but, borrowing from contemporary musical jargon, a re-mix. Taking the traditional ballet’s narrative structure as a starting point, choreographer/director Kevan Allen, composer Rickard Berg and sound designer Henri Latham-Koenig have produced a masterful mashup of dance styles, sounds and popular Delibes tunes with turntable-inspired rhythms and beats that transform the action into the immediate present. Wendy Olver’s costumes, too, displace the characters from classical ballet to a sophisticated enclave of extrovert bohemians, in contrast to Justin Williams’ modular set retaining the sylvan character of the original. Throughout KVN Dance Company’s production of Coppelia these similarities to and divergences from the traditional ballet endlessly encourage and subvert our expectations. 

Coppelius is a maker of automata, or mechanical dolls, and his great project is to give life to one of them, his ‘daughter’ Coppelia. His persona is a fusion of three characters in ETA Hoffman’s eerie psychological short story, Der Sandmann. One is a shady itinerant oculist selling lenses, another an alchemist and the third a physics professor versed in occult sciences with a Promethean desire to create life in his mechanical dolls (Der Sandmann was published just two years before Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein). There is no place for the uncanny in the Delibes score, however, with the result that Saint-Léon’s doctor is downgraded to an eccentric but misguided doll maker in a small German village. Despite Allen’s desire to question “why Dr. Coppelius was so intent on creating a life-sized clockwork doll for himself”, and his brief suggestion of an answer in erotic gratification, his characterization of Coppelius (Michael Downing), remains — despite Berg’s promptings — more Saint-Léon than Freud.

Allen maintains the traditional setting of the ballet, dividing the action between the village square outside Dr. Coppelius’ studio in Act 1 and the inside of his workshop in Act 2. With a quick reversal of elements, Williams’ set suggests what is outside and what is inside, but they are insufficient to counter the choreographic similarity between the acts, making the two joined scenes of the second act appear a variation of the first. This is also because Olver’s tastefully exaggerated costumes blur the distinction of the characters between villagers and a successful rollout of Coppelius’ dolls. In the first act the balance of all the elements works so well that the occasional longueurs of classical ballet — the drawing out of the narrative into entertaining divertissements — appear to pass over into the latter part of the production. Nevertheless, the thread of the story is still clear through the interactions between Franz (Danny Fogarty), Swanhilda (Marina Fraser) and the doctor, while the other characters swirl around and through them as forces that maintain their prodigious energy and colour from beginning to end. 

KVN’s remix of Coppelia is Allen’s first production for his new company and is clearly a vehicle for his brand of artistic fusion. Under Mike Robertson’s lighting, the costumes, music, sound and choreography work brilliantly together, each egging the others on to greater expression, but by the end the story tends to melt away into the performance. It begs the question of what Allen will do next with his expressive palette. There is a sharpness and an awareness in his choreography that points perhaps to an energetic satire, a field of dance that is sadly under-represented in an era that desperately needs it. Rather than following the well-mined route of updating classical ballets, Allen and his team could give a contemporary choreographic edge to a period costume drama, for example, or a comedy of errors. With a sharper focus, their populist approach, humorous touch, choreographic asides and excellent handling of form could provide a vital antidote to the current sense of malaise.   

Choreographer and Lighting Designer: The association between Tero Saarinen and Mikki Kunttu

The choreographer, Tero Saarinen, trained as a dancer in the rigorous Vaganova system and joined the Finnish National Ballet. He started to create choreographic solos and duets through spending time by himself in the studio listening to ‘other voices’ in his head and giving them shape. Only when Ohad Naharin saw one of his early works in 1994 and invited him to create on Batsheva Dance Company did the notion of becoming a choreographer begin to materialize. Before that, however, Saarinen had decided to pull up his career as a dancer and to put down choreographic roots, setting out for Japan whose culture and dance traditions had always attracted him. Finding much in common between the mental landscapes of Japan and Finland, in particular the cultivation of a minimal, almost frugal way of living, it is perhaps unsurprising that Saarinen was drawn to the dance form of Butoh. For a year he studied under the guidance of its co-founder, Kazuo Ohno — then in his eighties — and his son, Yoshito, as well as in workshops with Akiko Motofuji, the widow of Butoh’s co-founder, Tatsumi Hijikata. Saarinen seems to have found in Butoh a freedom of expression that derives from turning oneself inside out. Considering Ohno’s performances were, in his son’s words, ‘an occasion on which those ghosts dormant in him come to life’, Saarinen’s search for a choreographic form for his ‘other voices’ had providentially found a kindred spirit. It was as if the edges of Saarinen’s identity both as a Finn and as a classical dancer dissolved in the creative chemistry of Ohno’s workshops. The experience, he recalls, ‘completely changed my understanding of what dance can be and what can be achieved through it…how movement can be used to express the hidden, forgotten or repressed peripheries of humanity.’ He also shared with Ohno his empathy for the natural environment; Ohno once remarked in a workshop, ‘Make your dance more lifelike. You can grasp what life is all about by simply studying how a tree grows.’ For Saarinen the comingling of the spirit of Butoh with his Finnish roots created a choreographic amalgam that continues to transcend cultural barriers, revealing contrasting sensitivities and awakening new understandings. In formulating his aesthetic approach to dance making, Saarinen has remarked that “the dominance of words numbs us from a more sensory-rich experience of reality. By investing more in sensing, we could eventually experience each other, nature and life in a more holistic way.” 

The lighting designer, Mikki Kunttu, started out as a guitarist in a rock band and decided to study sound production at the Tampere School of Arts and Communication. Having started the course, however, he discovered it was concentrated solely on television and radio so he decided to change to the study of light, where he felt immediately at home with both his fellow students and his teacher. Kunttu recalls that his course was heavily weighted on the technical aspect; the creative side revealed itself to him only very gradually. “Later on, I understood that if you want to create and understand your own style or even aim to look for it, you’ll have to do this in-depth work on your own…The connection to your own artistic expression is a very personal thing and requires a level of solitude.” 

Having developed along similar introspective paths towards discovering their own artistic expression, Kunttu and Saarinen seemed destined to work together. When Saarinen returned from Japan in 1993, he was commissioned by Dance Theatre MD in Tampere to create his first evening of work and was assigned as his lighting designer a student in his first year of study. “My first lighting design project for the school was for contemporary dance”, Kunttu recalls. “Tero happened to be the choreographer. It was the very first time I had come across contemporary dance at all. I think we really hit it off from the get-go.” Saarinen’s recollection was less sanguine: “Mikki reminded me that at the premiere I was so nervous I stayed behind the lighting board with him and kept asking how it was going.” The evening evidently went well enough for the two to continue working together on projects over the next couple of years and when Saarinen created Westward Ho! in 1996 their collaboration was sealed, marking the official beginning of Tero Saarinen Company (TSC). 

What these two artists with their contrasting sensitivities had in common was that they were open to dialogue. “We never wanted to stick to something that ‘seemed to work in the past’”, recalls Kunttu. “There’s always been this strong will to create and to explore together. It’s always been very important for me to have a free hand in terms of the design.  I believe over the years we have really built a concrete base of confidence between us. The creative process is always very fragile and if this sort of confidence and trust is achieved and cultivated, it is really the best grounds for creative work. It’s not often with other choreographers that lighting would inspire concrete changes of choreography on stage or even help create something completely new. Tero is very aware of the light and the space and that way of working is a big inspiration for me.” He readily acknowledges, however, that “the main obstacle is approaching visuality too much from the technical perspective, thus letting the tech overshadow the creative inspiration…I consider the tech as being the brush you paint with; it’s no use focusing on the brush when you’re painting.” For Saarinen, Kunttu “not only illuminates the action on stage, but also creates architectural and emotional spaces. He is innovative, constantly updating his skills and looking for new ways to implement the art of lighting design, both in the theatre and in other kinds of spaces. All of this is fascinating and inspiring.” 

Although TSC has a strong Finnish identity, Saarinen believes in collaboration and cultural exchange programs — in the 25 years of the company’s life, he has worked with artists from Kenya, Australia, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Norway and the US — as key elements in constructing all the company’s activities on fundamental humanist values — equal rights and respect for all individuals — as well as on education. The basis for this was laid during his stay in Japan where he was able to attend private Nihon buyohclasses led by Yoko Fujima to understand and learn the basics of traditional Japanese dances. “A huge amount of detail and internal information is passed down from generation to generation. The fact that I, a complete outsider, was able to be part of this chain for a while…made me reflect on the importance of active, constructive and respectful intergenerational dialogue and transmission of knowledge…I believe the only way to really learn and make our lives better is through communication and transmission between nations, generations and traditions. All these elements, experiences, and tastes have shaped my choreographic thinking and are reflected in both my creations and teaching.” Saarinen has developed what he calls the Tero Technique, an approach to movement that focuses on awakening all the senses and activating every cell and nerve ending (it has also been called ‘butoh with wings’). “Technically, we pay a lot of attention to the feet, fingers, eyes and skin. The goal, both in the class and during the creative process, is to create an environment where the participant feels safe to take risks and develop. When dancers are 360 degrees aware and 100% present, they become authentic, vibrant and also more diverse. All of this leads to a dance that is constantly morphing and surprising, like flora and fauna.” 

This simile of natural regeneration is one that pervades Saarinen’s thinking. He remains passionate about creating and while he feels some of his works can stand the test of time, he doesn’t want his company to become ‘a museum’. “We want to serve as a springboard for those interested in exploring and developing their own choreographic movement language and this art form. Our common dream is to provide opportunities, mentor and promote the next generation of dance makers, sound designers, lighting designers etc. I think the idea of total artwork needs constant updating and it feels great to be helping future generations on this path of development.” 

Two years before the Covid-19 pandemic, Kunttu had moved with his two teenage sons to Montreal to work with the Cirque du Soleil, where he was able to continue to push the boundaries of his art. “Lighting designers have always introduced new ways of visual storytelling and I see them as the bold risk-takers always willing to make another leap into the unknown…They have pushed the envelope of stage performance more than any other profession in the field.” But as soon as the effects of the first lockdown took hold and it became clear that Cirque du Soleil would close, Kunttu brought his family back to Finland where he has managed to set up a new studio. He has ongoing projects — he is the production designer for the Finnish National Opera’s upcoming Wagner Ring cycle — but most have had their realizations postponed. Although he is happy to have made the decision to return to Finland, it’s been very difficult to keep afloat in an artistic discipline that has suffered inordinately from the disruption of the pandemic. 

For Saarinen, the pandemic coincided with the 25th anniversary of his company but despite the restrictions TSC managed to celebrate the opening of its new office and studio space in Helsinki’s Cable Factory, to maintain its network of staff and to initiate two residencies. However, all its plans for artistic collaborations and exchanges had to be put on hold. With live performances curtailed, one project Saarinen was able to undertake with filmmaker Thomas Freundlich (who made a wonderful documentary on Saarinen in 2018 called Rooted With Wings) is a multi-camera filmed re-enactment of his Third Practice that had premiered for the Monteverdi Festival in 2019. With a return to live performance for the Helsinki Festival, TSC is planning to present the Finnish première of Transit on August 19-21 in the new studio space, a work that had its world première last October at Malmö Opera as a co-production with Skånes Dansteater. In line with one of Saarinen’s all-consuming themes, Transit ‘examines our relationship with nature’ as a ‘frantically performed ritual, a fight for survival and change’ that adds his eloquent choreography to the multiplicity of artistic voices expressing concern about the current environmental crisis.  

In the Spring of 2022, the new Tanssin Talo, or Dance House, will open in Helsinki and TSC is a key partner in establishing its path into the future. It will be a culmination of many years of dance advocacy in Finland by Saarinen, his colleagues and supporters, and he is naturally enthusiastic: “The new house will serve as a unifying address and event platform for the presentation of a wide range of dance truths and as a stage for international guest performances. It will also be our home stage so we will perform more in Finland. In addition to our home performances, we will also co-produce guest performances with Tanssin Talo.”

With the backlog of interrupted engagements, and the long arc of production schedules, it will be a few years before Kunttu will be in a position to light a new work by Saarinen —there are, however, several accomplished freelance lighting designers and supervisors, in addition to Kunttu, listed on TSC’s web site (Third Practice has lighting design by Eero Auvinen, and Transit by Minna Tiikkainen). But for the opening season at Tanssin Talo Saarinen plans to stage some of his key works for which Kunttu designed the lighting (including the post-apocalyptic Breath), so there will be a chance to celebrate their long and prolific collaboration. Kunttu, who has always correlated the high energy levels of lighting with the energy of dance, has worked with many choreographers, “but a creation with Tero always feels like coming home.” It’s a neat temporal intersection that Kunttu’s fiftieth birthday should coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of TSC as it moves into its new home. 

The Death of Liam Scarlett

On April 17 it was announced that Liam Scarlett, former dancer and choreographer with the Royal Ballet, had died. He had just passed his 35^th birthday. Almost exactly a year ago, on March 23^rd, the Royal Ballet announced it would no longer be working with Scarlett, formerly artist-in-residence at Covent Garden, following his suspension from the company the previous August after a report emerged of ‘sexual misconduct with students’. The allegations against Scarlett went public in January in an article in The Times, after which the company announced that performances of his Symphonic Dances would not go ahead. Soon after, the Queensland Ballet, where Scarlett was an artistic associate, also severed ties with the choreographer, cancelling his planned production of Dangerous Liaisons. Both the Royal Ballet and Queensland ballet announced they had conducted independent investigations into the allegations of sexual misconduct. The Royal Ballet stated they had “found there were no matters to pursue in relation to alleged contact with students of the Royal Ballet School” and the director of Queensland Ballet, Li Cunxin, stated the company had found no evidence of improper behaviour by Scarlett in Australia.

So an acclaimed young choreographer’s reputation is publicly repudiated and his career wiped off international rosters despite statements that no evidence could be found to substantiate the claims against him. Then on the morning of April 16, the director of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Kasper Holten (who had been director of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden from 2006 to 2011), issued a press release saying that Scarlett’s full-length Frankenstein, scheduled for May 2022, would not go ahead because of “information (that) has recently emerged about unacceptable behaviour from…Liam Scarlett towards several people among the Royal Theatre’s employees during rehearsals in 2018 and 2019.” 

The coincidence of this announcement and Scarlett’s death the next day would seem to suggest that the fallout from his year-long public trial without jury had finally engulfed his spirit. While there is an incontrovertible argument against abuse, the loss of a life as a consequence does not square with it. Scarlett’s death is evidence of a penalty applied through the media rather than through the courts. Have the Royal Ballet, Queensland Ballet and Danish Theatre through their actions rooted out the cause of abuse or have they merely dealt with its effect? Scarlett trained at the Royal Ballet junior school, White Lodge, from the age of 8, graduating through the upper school into the main company at the age of 20. Was his behaviour an aberration or accepted practice? Over the twelve years of training, was he perhaps the product of an abusive culture? 

A prestigious institution like the Royal Ballet and its parent, the Royal Opera House, is run by individuals, but it is in the nature of their power to withdraw behind an institutional mask in the event of danger and to publicly deflect any repercussions on to an exposed individual. Had there been previous instances of Scarlett’s behaviour (or anyone else’s) that had been brushed under the plush red carpet during his rise to fame (from which the company basked in reflected glory)? Was he a victim of the times, of the #MeToo campaign that must have made institutions like the Royal Ballet nervous of what lay hidden from public view?  

In the first act of the ballet Romeo and Juliet, after the first scuffle between the rival families in Verona, the Duke enters and signals to the townspeople to step aside to reveal the dead. It is a powerful moment in Prokofiev’s score and in the choreography. The Duke brings the heads of the two warring families together to lay down their arms but the killing goes on in the next two acts until the two lovers take their own lives. In the Shakespeare play and in the original Bolshoi production, this final tragedy brings about a reconciliation between the two families. In Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s version for the Royal Ballet, that reconciliation is not shown on stage but is left in the hearts of the audience to sense. Liam Scarlett’s death is a tragedy, but if his death is to have any lasting legacy, a thorough reform of abusive culture wherever it may exist needs to take place. 

While some companies have maintained Scarlett’s work in their repertoires — on Sunday, Bayerisches Staatsballett dedicated the première of its streamed program Paradigma to his memory and the Royal New Zealand Ballet has announced it is reviving his 2015 A Midsummer Night’s Dream this December — I question whether the Royal Opera House, Queensland Ballet and the Royal Danish Theatres have the moral compass to pass judgement on the choreographer by withdrawing his works from their stages. Those who handled the investigations into Scarlett’s alleged abuse and found “there were no matters to pursue” yet sacrificed him on the altar of public opinion should admit their craven error and resign before any meaningful restitution can begin.