Ballet Nights #006, Cadogan Hall review - a mixed bag of excellence

It’s exactly a year since Ballet Nights, the self-styled taster platform for dance, started offering chirpily compered evenings of ballet and contemporary at venues where you'd least expect to find them. A first anniversary is already an achievement; to have arrived there bigger and better more so.

Typically, Ballet Nights’ sixth iteration was a one-off, but it was also a sell-out, at its largest venue yet, the 950-seat Cadogan Hall, home of the Royal Philharmonic. The hall has its own Steinway concert grand, which must have been a major draw for Ballet Nights founder, artistic director and MC Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, wedded as he is to the idea of topping each half of his varied selections of dance with a substantial piece for solo piano. Too bad he felt he couldn’t trust to the Cadogan acoustic without heavy amplification. I pitied the pianist, Viktor Erik Emanuel, whose measured and airy First Ballade of Chopin sounded as if it was being played underwater. This seemed to matter less in the second half’s Ondine, by Ravel (did someone twiddle a knob?). It’s a watery piece in any case, but it would have been vastly preferable to hear Viktor’s elegant playing au naturel.Variety is the USP of Ballet Nights, mixing new works with legacy classics, mature artists with emerging talents, which can mean there are some items you like more than others. But on this occasion it wasn’t just impossible to find a dud, but impossible to pick a favourite from such a strong field. The return to the stage of Royal Ballet principal Steven McRae, grounded for the best part of a year after a serious knee injury, was the official headliner, and he did indeed deliver an absolute Celtic blast in his flying scarlet kilt (pictured top). It’s a surprise to me that tap-dance, at this ferocious pitch, can be gentler on the knees than ballet. Urged on by the fiery Scots fiddling of Charlie Siem, McRae gave us, in a space that felt short of three minutes, a full display of his phenomenal mastery of dynamics.

Ballet dancers dancing ballet made a good showing too. The now almost statutory white swan pas de deux from Swan Lake had an appropriate shimmer – not easy to achieve on an empty concert platform, but Sangeun Lee and Gareth Haw from English National Ballet did it. Sarah Pierce and James Lankford of Nashville Ballet (pictured above) turned up the heat in a steamy, hands-on duet by Nashville’s Nick Mullikin, the charge between the pair almost indecent. Channeling a more modern vibe, Constance Devernay-Laurence (pictured below) leapt and stretched and used her long hair as a third limb in a solo response to a Dinah Washington torch song, “September in the Rain”. We’re used to seeing dancers’ legs in tights. Without them, the musculature is visible, and it was a surprise treat to be able to view strong working limbs this way, artfully lit, in choreography by Jordan James Bridge. More striking still among the ballet offerings was the solo Introducing Joy, a Balanchine-esque confection by the French choreographer Constant Vigier made expressly for the dancer Joy Womack. The Texan ballerina, who trained at the Bolshoi, was making a career in Moscow until Russia invaded Ukraine. Supremely flexible, deliciously poised, this is a dancer I’d like to see much more of.Contemporary dance, in various flavours, made an impression too on this smorgasbord. Chacha and Tiara was a laugh-out-loud duet by Rentardo Nakaaki set to Latin rhythms. Super-expressive ENB dancer Julia Conway has proved her comic chops before. Ably partnered by Eric Snyder, she could dare more virtuosity too in a series of increasingly perilous developées and sudden comedy slumps. There was charm in a setting of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If (the one everyone knows the first line to), recited by – of all people – the grand-daddy of hiphop Jonzi D, who walked about in his rasta hat addressing the verse to young dancer Alexander Fadayiro, who sported an afro, office shirt and skinny tie.

Ridiculous, I know, but I was fuming on behalf of a 17th-century composer for much of the scorchingly gymnastic duet created and danced by Sarah Jane Taylor and James Wilton. The Four Seasons, whose "Summer" their piece was a response to (all growing corn and bursting seedpods – lots of terrific imagery) is the work of Antonio Vivaldi, not Max Richter, as credited in the programme. As I heard it, Richter had merely moved some of the parts around and oomphed up the bass. Fine for Richter to do this, but credit where it's due.

The vibrant soprano voice of Madil Hardis was just one of the arresting features of a superb duet called Tanzt, choreographed by the corporate-sounding duo Pett|Clausen-Knight, in which James Pett and Rebecca Bassett-Graham, both from the Wayne McGregor company, flung their bodies together and apart as if they were being blown by some invisible tornado. "Tanzt, Tanzt, Tanzt ..." insisted the singer. And tanz they did. Set Fast was another helpful descriptor, the title of a new piece by the very young choreographer Grace O'Brien, still at the Rambert School but already a name to remember. Marshalling seven dancers into phalanxes of shuddering movement that is mostly glued to the spot sounds like an academic exercise. But O'Brien's imagination had come up with countless ways to move the human form without travelling – bunched fists, shoulder rolls, trembling fingers, and a curious rolling, swaying gait that kept me mesmerised, and, indeed, riveted.

A triumph, then, as far as it goes. But producing endless one-off shows is hardly time or energy efficient, and the full-length gala format is by its nature bitty. So the future may lie elsewhere. Ballet Nights has already dipped a toe in the nightclub scene, showing up last May at London's Ministry of Sound. It has plans for a masterclass series. It's here to stay, in some form.

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