In London, Massed Human Misery and Communal Revelations

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Critic's Notebook

Crystal Pite's "Light of Passage" at the Royal Ballet takes on big issues: refugees, life and death. At Ballet Black, Gregory Maqoma shines.

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By Roslyn Sulcas

LONDON — A chiaroscuro vision of blacks and grays; a painterly sweep of humanity; a cinematic framing of surging, pulsating bodies. In Crystal Pite's "Flight Pattern," those bodies are for the most part indistinguishable, a seething human mass of misery and hope, refugees whose desperate desires, fears and losses are subsumed by the attempt to survive.

"Flight Pattern," set to the first part of Henryk Gorecki's mournful Symphony No. 3, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," was the Royal Ballet's first main-stage commission from a female choreographer in 18 years when it was created in 2017, and it was greeted with near-universal acclaim. Now it makes up the first section of Pite's "Light of Passage," a full-length ballet that had its premiere on Tuesday night, and uses the remaining two sections of the Gorecki score to form an equally crowd-pleasing and equally simplistic narrative about the passage through life toward death.

Pite's skill and choreographic craft are undeniable. In "Flight Pattern," the 36-dancer ensemble moves like an amoeba, rippling and roiling, lines entangling and morphing into waves of motion. The music is quiet at first, and always slow, with a brief soprano solo (Francesca Chiejina) based on a 15th-century Polish lament, in which the Virgin Mary speaks to her dying son.

The music, which Pite uses as an aural landscape rather than an impulse for movement, works perfectly with the painterly stage design (by Jay Gower Taylor), dominated by huge dark walls that open and close behind the dancers, sometimes allowing a narrow column of light to shine through, sometimes creating an impenetrable darkness. Through the gaps lies the longed-for border crossing, the holding-pen prison, the imaginary land of hope and opportunity.

Occasionally Pite allows individuals to emerge from the crowd, most notably Kristen McNally in a solo suggesting the loss of a child — symbolized, with a hefty dose of cliché and sentiment, by a tenderly cradled coat. At the end of "Flight Pattern," she and Marcellino Sambé offer a beautifully danced, grief-stricken pas de deux — more balletic than the rest of the piece — as snow falls around them.

Pite is undoubtedly sincere in her empathy for the plight of refugees, but the implicit demand for a similar compassion from the audience, and the smooth aestheticization of suffering, are among the reasons I feel resistant to "Flight Pattern," despite its choreographic and visual accomplishments. It's appealing to feel like a better person just because you’ve watched it, but you’re not really.

The two new sections are similarly skillful but even more sentimental. "Covenant" opens with a small boy, dressed in white, running on the spot, golden light refracted through broken red-and-black clouds behind him. (Bravo to the lighting designer Tom Visser.) The boy is the first of six children who are lifted, supported and framed by a mass of black-clad adults as Chiejina sings quietly amid slow-changing chords. (Program notes tell us this section has its source in the U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child; it's the kind of detail you don't want to know about a ballet.)

At the end, the children stand alone at the front of the stage, the adults receding in an interlinked line at the back. Do they represent hope or sacrifice? Perhaps the ambiguity is intentional.

Part 3, "Passage," gives us, rather schematically, the opposite end of the spectrum, opening with an older couple (Isidora Barbara Joseph and Christopher Havell, from the Company of Elders, a nonprofessional Sadler's Wells-based troupe) who seem to represent life's final passage toward death. Moving amid a forest of white columns, they gesture and coil around one another, before ceding the stage to the massed, counter-pointed sweeps of movement that Pite does so effectively.

At various points duos emerge to perform balletic pas de deux, full of ice-skater swirls and arched overhead lifts, legs scissoring and splitting open in the air. The dancers are beautiful but generic, perhaps all younger versions of the older pair. Mostly the ensemble is the star, swaying, swooping, rising and falling in perfectly synchronized cadence, haloed by Visser's golden lighting.

At the end, the dancers frame the older man on each side as he walks slowly upstage, leaving his partner, seated alone and grieving, at the front — a predictable and rather sentimental ending.

Like Kenneth MacMillan's "Song of the Earth" (1965), "Light of Passage" offers us a portrait of the human journey with death as a constant accompanying presence. But it's far less cohesive and poetic than MacMillan's work, and less interesting as movement. In "Flight Pattern" — as with many of the works Pite creates for large ballet companies — the dancers are deployed as a means to an overall effect, not as exponents of physical or technical possibilities.

The opposite was true in a program the next night at the Linbury, the Royal Opera House's smaller black-box theater, where Ballet Black performed recent works by Cassa Pancho and the South African choreographer Gregory Maqoma.

Pancho, who is mixed race, founded Ballet Black in 2001, soon after writing a dissertation on the paucity of Black women in British ballet. Since then, the company has commissioned more than 50 ballets by 37 choreographers and built an admiring public.

But not without obstacles, as Pancho's work, "Say It Loud," makes clear. It's a biographical account of the company's history in seven sections, to a soundtrack that includes Steve Reich, the grime rapper Flowdan, the calypso singer Lord Kitchener and voice-overs ("What's the point of Ballet Black?" "Can we talk to a dancer who has experienced racism?"). The choreography is entirely forgettable but enjoyably showcased the dancers as distinct personalities, switching between fervent classicism, ironic shimmying with feathered fans and more a contemporary, grounded physicality.

Maqoma's "Black Sun" is far more ambitious, merging classical and contemporary, past and present to suggest the intense struggle and rewards of being connected to a bodily ancestral memory, both personal and collective. Set to a thrumming, complex score by Michael Asante, known as Mikey J, "Black Sun" begins in ballet mode, with women purring across the stage on pointe and a pas de deux with William Forsythe-esque push-pull dynamics. But this is the least interesting part of the piece, which soon gives way to more grounded, pointe-shoe-free movement, the dancers slowly succumbing to a more internally propelled dance, their bodies shaking and convulsing, shoulders and necks angling, faces pulled into grimaces.

Toward the end, the immensely talented Mthuthuzeli November, who is also South African, drums and sings with great power, jumping and skittering in one spot, as the dancers respond, physically and vocally, to his invocation.

It's a bit "Rite of Spring," but there is no sacrifice, just a sense of communal immersion in something powerful, and an enormous commitment from dancers who have dared to reveal themselves onstage.

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