A Royal Ballet star and two dance legends packed the Royal Opera House’s tiny Linbury Studio last weekend for Natalia Osipova’s latest solo venture. The three-part programme featured Martha Graham’s Errand into the Maze, Frederick Ashton’s Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan and a bold new dance theatre commission from Norwegian choreographer Jo Strømgren. The varied evening demonstrated Osipova’s insatiable artistic curiosity and offered yet further proof of the breadth of her stylistic range.
Errand into the Maze, created in 1947, is a true Gesamtkunstwerk with a commissioned score by Gian Carlo Menotti and decor by the modernist sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, who created a standing structure inspired by the female pelvis. The 15-minute piece is a feminist rethink of the Minotaur myth, in which a female protagonist fights and overpowers the monster.
Graham herself made light of the gulf between ballet and her own writing — “The techniques are not so different” — but her dances, written for her own lean limbs and steely core, are a hard language to master. Osipova is compelling in her solo sequences, her torso convulsively flinching and contracting to Menotti’s spiky percussion, leg kicking high in unwavering battements. Her bull was the Royal Ballet’s Marcelino Sambé, who is also scheduled to dance Romeo to Osipova’s Juliet at the Royal Opera House this May. Sambé’s horned and near-naked Minotaur is the stuff of nightmares, bouncing in Osipova’s wake on tirelessly elastic feet.
The second piece, a newly commissioned film, focused on another 20th-century dance pioneer. The 17-year-old Frederick Ashton saw Isadora Duncan dance in London in 1921. She was well past her best — one pitiless observer noted that “She looked in a crude light like the kind of thing Aubrey Beardsley might have designed to scare away birds from his window box” — but her performance made a lasting impression on the young choreographer-to-be. He remembered every step and, 54 years later, began creating his tribute. The barefoot Osipova conjures the magic of those Dionysian measures as she surrenders to Kate Shipway’s rippling piano: the eager runs, the weightless skips, the windblown changes of direction. Director Grigory Dobrygin’s camera tracks her closely, catching every breath, recording even the softest footfall.
For pudding we had the world premiere of The Exhibition, a two-hander for Osipova and former Northern Ballet dancer Christopher Akrill. Jo Strømgren’s work is seldom seen in the UK, but he is remembered particularly fondly for 1997’s hilarious A Dance Tribute to the Art of Football.
The Exhibition — essentially a flirtatious fight between two gallery goers — shows the same flair for sight gags but also contains a great deal of text, with Osipova rattling away in Russian and Akrill complaining about her bizarre but strangely alluring behaviour. After a double striptease, this odd couple begin to dance — one gracefully, the other nerdily — against Strømgren’s changing background of arty monochrome stills. Osipova has always been a natural physical comedian (Kitri, Swanilda) but her vocal delivery is also hugely impressive — maybe time for a sitcom?
★★★★☆
To March 10, rbo.org.uk