Ballet Nights 009 – Bound in Motion Review
Ballet Nights marked its second anniversary with Bound in Motion, another glittering cornucopia of dance old and new
This article as first published on London Unattached (london-unattached.com)
They say the best laid plans go awry, and so it proved for me on the evening of 10th September, when my carefully laid plan to reach Cadogan Hall in good time for Ballet Nights 009 – Bound in Motion unravelled spectacularly. In an attempt to beat the odds on underground strike day, I allocated one hour and 40 minutes for a direct bus journey that should normally take 40 minutes maximum. However, a combination of rain, massively engorged traffic slowed down by ubiquitous roadworks, and temperamental buses (one broke down, others failed to arrive, others still stopped halfway) meant it took two and half hours including a very long walk across London to get there. Obviously very, very late.
Sorry to open with a tedious tale the likes of which many of you will be personally familiar with. I had to explain why this is only a partial review and why I am not awarding a star rating. Ballet Nights deserved better, alas…
Now marking its second anniversary, Ballet Nights is buoyant. Its particular format – a collection of short pieces, old and new, classical and especially commissioned, compèred by its dynamic founder and Artistic Director Jamiel Devernay-Laurence – has clearly hit a chord with audiences both at home and abroad. It has toured to Bucharest, Romania; Brisbane, Australia; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In the UK, it has appeared at its home venue, Lanterns Theatre in Canary Wharf, as well as the Ministry of Sound. And it’s becoming a regular at Chelsea’s Cadogan Hall, where it’s now returned fresh from a triumphant performance in Glasgow.
Equally importantly, Ballet Nights has been able to garner the support of outstanding dancers such as stars of English National Ballet, Sangeun Lee and Gareth Haw.
To make my nightmare journey even more heart-breaking, I got to Cadogan Hall just in time to miss their performance of Slingerland Duet. They had given William Forsythe’s 2000 work its UK premiere in the June edition of Ballet Nights, and I was looking forward to seeing it again. At the time I found it an intriguing piece, with its occasional quotes of baroque dance gestures immediately put through Forsythe’s distorting filter; and once again I marvelled at the superb understanding between these two dancers and the ease with which they tackle Forsythe’s quirky pair work.
There was much to enjoy in Part Two, though. In keeping with the Ballet Nights format, it opened with a piece played by its dedicated pianist, Viktor Erik Emanuel – Ravel’s capricious Gaspard De La Nuit.
Next, one of the Royal Ballet’s most promising young dancers, Caspar Lench, performed an especially commissioned piece by Jordan James Bridge, who’s fast becoming a Ballet Nights go-to choreographer. Danced to music by Rival Consoles, and entitled Flux, it might have been subtitled “what you can do with the body beautiful.”
Under constantly shifting lighting that painted his body in a muscle-defining chiaroscuro, Lench made short work of a demanding contemporary piece, with lighting-fast changes of direction. He looked superb.
Students of Rambert School of Ballet & Contemporary Dance have also become Ballet Nights regulars. For this programme, three third-year students – Keavie Holliday, Morgan Phillips, and Chloe Hurn – in cream-coloured long tunics, with loose hair, performed “Sirens”, a piece choreographed by Rambert student Omar Toussaint to watery music by Ernst Reijseger, which did exactly what it said on the tin.
Much more exciting was Glasgow-born dancer Andrew Cummings of Gauthier Dance in Germany.
In his introduction Devernay-Laurence proudly stated that presenting a choreography by Balanchine was “a landmark moment for us” – the choreographer’s clean lines and classical movement a true balm to the soul, particularly when performed by two extraordinary dancers such as Muntagirov and Kaneko.
They danced the all too brief pas de deux, where Terpsichore, the muse of dance, teaches finesse to the callow youth that is the newborn Apollo. With his perfectly proportioned body, meticulous technique and cat-like silent landings, Muntagirov is indeed the god of beauty, Apollo; Kaneko, a dancer to whom no amount of besotted adjectives can do proper justice, matches him step by step, the perfect harmony between their bodies (they are a couple in real life) fully honouring the pure classicism of the work.
Here’s a list of the dance pieces I missed:
- A new choreography for Saint-Saëns’s The Dying Swan by Calvin Richardson, danced by his Royal Ballet colleague Denilson Almeida;
- The British debut of dancers from Jersey’s contemporary ballet company, Ballet D’Jerri in Garrett Smith’s Footsteps;
- Femina, a piece for six dancers choreographed by EKLEIDO to music by Floating Points & Stella Mozgawa;
- Andrés Barrios & El Yiyo, modern day flamenco.
© Teresa Guerreiro
(Banner image credit: Ballet Nights 009, Fumi Kaneko and Vadim Muntagirov in Apollo pas de deux. Photo: Deborah Jaffe)
Ballet Nights 009 – Bound in Motion ran at Cadogan Hall on 10 and 11 September 2025
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