Birmingham Royal Ballet: Carmina Burana & Serenade, Coliseum - dance review

This revival of Birmingham Royal Ballet director David Bintley's earliest work for the company is grandly theatrical in scale
Panting for love: Iain Mackay as an ardent priest and Samara Downs in Carmina Burana (Picture: Alastair Muir)
Alastair Muir
Lyndsey Winship21 March 2015

It’s 25 years since Birmingham Royal Ballet was founded, when the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet upped sticks to the Midlands, and for the last 20 of those years director and choreographer David Bintley has been at the helm.

BRB make regular visits to London, but they’re sometimes seen as being a bit safe and provincial for those of us used to the capital’s cultural riches. This anniversary tour revives the first work Bintley made for the company in 1995, and if you think you know what to expect from BRB it might come as a bit of a surprise.

Powered by Carl Orff’s mighty Carmina Burana (and excellent Birmingham choir Ex Cathedra), the piece is grandly theatrical in scale, but the tone moves unexpectedly from solemn to cheeky and comedic.

It’s a story of three priests casting off their faith and roving out into the big bad world. Their naive hopes are often dashed — women don’t love you back, fortune doesn’t work in your favour — but it’s a colourful adventure, thanks to Philip Prowse’s striking, anarchic designs, which leap from Keith Haring’s primary palette to pregnant girls with Cleopatra bobs and cartoon pudenda.

There’s a showgirl swan that some sinister Weeble-shaped waiters want to eat, and lovesick Iain Mackay stripping off not just his dog collar but everything else, to throw himself at an unattainable lover. Alas, Fortuna (Samara Downs) is a cold, hard woman.

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1/9

You never know where this Wonderland-ish trip is going next. The choreography is not revelatory — the bodies, like the voices, mostly moving en masse — but it’s engaging spectacle all the way.

The best dancing actually happens in the programme’s opening piece, George Balanchine’s Serenade (from 1935), set to lush Tchaikovsky. Standing out in a stageful of girls and their diaphanous skirts are the super-swift moves of Momoko Hirata, and the fulsome port de bras of soloist Céline Gittens (even her neck is expressive!). Never mind 25 years, this work has lasted for 80. Some things are timeless.

Ends tonight (020 7845 9300, eno.org)

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