Resurgence, London City Ballet, Sadler’s Wells review - the phoenix rises yet again

You need to be fairly long in the tooth to feel nostalgia for the heyday of London City Ballet. The group was set up in 1978 by the late Harold King to tour a large and varied classical repertoire at home and abroad. Princess Diana, its patron, befriended the company, supporting its work both publicly and privately.

But in 1996 it ran out of road, and despite a valiant attempt to revive it as the lightly tweaked City Ballet of London, it has remained, until now, a piece of British dance history.

A newly reformed London City Ballet of 14 dancers has just completed a UK tour, ending with a handful of performances in London prior to a stint in New York. Director Christopher Marney played a careful hand in his choices for a programme he called Resurgence, among them a buoyant piece of pure dance that was a hit in the early 1990s, a premiere from rising star Arielle Smith and – as the pièce de résistance – an intriguing four-hander by Kenneth MacMillan not seen for 50 years. While it would have been good to have had the services of an orchestra in the pit, we can all understand why that’s not currently an option. This is a fledgling ballet company surviving – and probably only just – on a wave of goodwill.

So what are its chances this time around? The dancers, without exception, are excellent, the result of a global trawl that took in Cuban, Canadian and South Korean as well as British talent. And I can well imagine that this programme, and this kind of repertory mix, will have had a greater impact in the smaller spaces it has been visiting and intends to tour in future. On the vast empty plain that is the Sadler’s Wells stage however, only some of the programme looked at ease.

The sheer, bright joy on the faces of the dancers in Larina Waltz (pictured top), set to an extract from Tchaikovsky’s sweeping ballroom music for his opera Eugene Onegin, beamed to the back wall of the house and whirled the steps along. Created by Ashley Page for a gala in 1993, its challenging leaps and turns were designed to show off the specific talents of four star Royal Ballet couples. Here it was adapted for five couples, who skittered, leapt  and flew as if born to it. When Arthur Wille exploded out from the wings in a super-high sideways scissor jump, the clap of his calves in mid-air met with gasps around the theatre.

The new work from Cuban-born, Camden-raised Arielle Smith delivered the colour and rhythmic energy we have already come to expect from this young dance maker, but Five Dances (pictured above) didn’t grab me with its freshness of invention as her breakout hit for English National Ballet in 2021 had done. The perky, Appalachian folk-tinged score by John Adams coped better with being piped than the Tchaikovsky, which frankly sounded poor. Perhaps one day someone will explain to me why recorded music so rarely relays well in a state-of-the-art theatre that must surely have equipment designed for the purpose. Or perhaps I should just be glad that live music sounds so much better.

Eve, another new work, this time by the company’s artistic director Christopher Marney, was a re-telling of the Garden of Eden story that focused on Eve and the serpent (pictured above). It’s a bold idea and it began well, but lost me as the figure of Eve was joined on stage by manifestations of multiple shape-shifting Adams and Eves.

The standout of the evening was the revival, after more than 50 years neglect, of Kenneth MacMillan’s drawing-room drama, a setting of Fauré’s Ballade, for piano and orchestra. The four dancers – one woman to three men – are friends who meet up for an evening in, perhaps to play cards. But as each of the males makes a play for the woman, and as she begins to welcome the advances of one of them, things get complicated. In a development entirely relayed through fluid steps and lifts, she subtly fends off the other two while trying desperately not to disrupt the status quo. It's the early work of a genius and I relished the opportunity to see it. And with guest Alina Cojocaru as the principal love interest to boot. Her precision as a dancer and nuance as a dance-actor are unmatched, and it was a real coup for London City Ballet to get her. All power to their next move.

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