The Royal Ballet have announced their new 2013/14 season, the first full season under their new Director, Kevin O’Hare. And there’s lots to look forward to.
Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way first; yes, they will be doing The Nutcracker at Christmas. Yes, they will be doing another Tchaikovsky/Petipa crowd pleaser – this time it’s Sleeping Beauty. Yes, they will be doing a MacMillan blockbuster – it’s Romeo and Juliet. So far so good.
O’Hare has added another couple of classical works – Giselle, and Balanchine’s Jewels. He gets lots of points from me for that as Jewels is one of my favourite ballets, a full-length plotless ballet with grace, humour and some of Balanchine’s best choreography, that sends you out of the Opera House feeling full of joy.
Lauren Cuthbertson as Juliet and Federico Bonelli as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet © Bill Cooper/ROH 2012
But now it get interesting – we are promised a new full-length ballet by star choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, The Winter’s Tale. Wheeldon’s first full-length ballet, Alice in Wonderland, is currently back in the repertoire for its third sell-out run and general agreement is that it gets better every time. The one weakness of Alice is its lack of a strong central love story; the Winter’s Tale, ‘based on Shakespeare’s enduring tale of love, loss and reconciliation’ won’t have that problem.
There are even more surprises as O’Hare’s ambitions for the company are revealed in his plans for a new full-length ballet every year from now on. Let’s just pause and take that in – given that Alice was the first new full-length ballet for sixteen years, one a year for the foreseeable future is quite a turnaround. More points to O’Hare.
Triple bills are well represented too, including new one-act ballets from David Dawson, Alastair Marriott and Wayne McGregor and a return of Liam Scarlett’s Sweet Violets (I hope he’s going to do some work on the story line before we see it again). MacMillan’s astounding Rite of Spring is back (interesting to see whether they stick with the male Chosen One following Monica Mason’s staging), as is McGregor’s Chroma, and Balanchine’s Serenade. Ashton and Jerome Robbins are in the mix too.
I’ve saved the big bonbon until last – a new version of Don Quixote by Carlos Acosta, in which he will also dance. An entertaining ballet not often staged at Covent Garden, given a new twist by the Royal’s ever popular Principal Guest Artist. Not surprisingly there will be a gala performance of that one.
And all of that is just the Main House. The Linbury Studio Theatre gets another dose of Scarlett’s Hansel and Gretel – a new full-length ballet which gets its premiere this May – and a whole raft of visiting companies, including New York City Ballet Principal Wendy Whelan with works by four young choreographers.
This is an exciting season – a challenge to once-a-year ballet goers to come out of their Nutcracker comfort zone; a siren call to modern dance fans to make the trek down the road from Sadler’s Wells; and above all a promise of thoroughly good time to ballet regulars hungry for something new. I can’t wait!
Full details of the 2013/14 season can be found on the ROH website
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