London City Ballet, Momentum Review 5*
London City Ballet’s Momentum is a gorgeous tribute to dance in four pieces performed with artistry and gusto
This article was first published on London Unattached (london-unattached.com)
Barely two years old, London City Ballet is flying high – very high, in fact. The modern-day revival of the original touring company (1978-97), this 15-strong troupe, dreamt up and assembled by dancer, choreographer and entrepreneur Christopher Marney, is creating new levels of excitement in the British ballet world. No wonder Sadler’s Wells was abuzz with expectation as London City Ballet’s current mixed bill, Momentum, reached London as part of an extensive international tour.
There was much to look forward to. Marney is committed to programming works which meant something in their time but have somehow faded into near oblivion: Momentum includes early pieces by Balanchine and Liam Scarlett. Also in the programme, and brand new to the UK, is Pictures at an Exhibition by one of the top choreographers of the moment, the US-based Ukrainian Alexei Ratmanski.
To complete the programme, each season will bring a brand new commission, this year a piece by Paris Opera Ballet Premier Danseur Florent Melac.
Anticipation was heightened by the presence of international ballet stars side by side with immensely talented young dancers, some not long out of school. Principal dancers Constance Devernay-Laurence and Joseph Taylor, formerly of Scottish National Ballet and Northern Ballet respectively, took to the stage alongside Alina Cojocaru, an exquisite ballerina loved by British audiences for her stints with The Royal Ballet and English National Ballet.
George Balanchine’s 1947 Haieff Divertimento, set to a spiky orchestral piece by Alexei Haieff, is a work for five couples in simple black and white costumes (very pale blue for the four subsidiary women). It requires absolute precision, both in individual execution and in ensemble dancing. The choreography is tricky and unforgiving: hops en pointe starting on bent knee and stretching to full pointe recur. The lifts need to soar, the arabesque lines need to be long and elegant.
Its moods oscillate between vivacious and nostalgic, but the flow of movement is continuous.
You wouldn’t know some of these dancers had never danced Balanchine before, so assured, precise and vibrant was their performance, led by Jimin Kim and Alejandro Virelles (pictured top).
With Liam Scarlett’s tragic death in 2021, aged 35, British ballet lost an outstanding talent, a choreographer of huge ambition, with perfect command of the ballet vocabulary, deep musicality and a rare ability to instil haunting emotion into his works.
Consolations and Liebestraum is one of Scarlett’s early works. Set to the Romantic music of Franz Liszt, its loose narrative follows a love affair from his heady early days to its painful unravelling, as remembered by one woman (Alina Cojacaru). Three couples embody three stages of the affair: Yuria Isaka and Arthur Wille as the playful youngsters discovering the rapture of love; later Jimin Kim and Nicolas Vavrečka blending touch and rejection; and finally, the heart-wrenching break-up danced with deeply affecting chemistry by Joseph Taylor and Alina Cojocaru.
We could have done with the interval after this piece, the better to process the flurry of emotions it elicited, but it was immediately followed by Melac’s Soft Shore, it, too, a meditation on relationships: those of Constance Deverney-Laurence and Alejandro Virelles and of Arthur Wille and Joseph Taylor.
Sections of Beethoven’s melancholy “Razumovsky String Quartet” guide the two couples in versions of uneasy, at times tumultuous, affairs. Constance Deverney-Laurence is a powerful dancer, with muscular technique and great expressiveness and was ably partnered by Alejandro Virelles; in the parallel duet the hard-working Joseph Taylor returned to partner Arthur Wille.
Alexei Ratmansky created his Pictures at an Exhibition in 2014 for the New York City Ballet. It’s the third most famous iteration of the piece, following 19th-century composer Modest Mussorgsky’s staging of his piano score, that imagines a walk through an exhibition, and the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky’s own staging in 1928.
Ratmansky was inspired by Kandinsky, and enhanced projections of the painter’s own “Colour Study: Squares with Concentric Circles” animate the backcloth.
The dancers, in flimsy white tunics stained with splashes of colour, erupt onto the stage like an artist’s own materials; Ratmansky deconstructs the original sections of Mussorgsky’s composition with reverse characterisation: for example, he gives “The Gnome”, representing an angry, malevolent small being, to a ballerina; “Baba Yaga”, the old witch of Russian folklore, is danced by a man.
Ratmanski, who came to London to oversee the initial stages of the LCB production and is on record as saying, “we try to give the audience the feeling that the music is born from the movements of the dancers”, created a work that combines stunning originality with unbroken historic tradition, history that sadly extends to the present time with the 2022 addition to the backdrop of the Ukrainian flag for the finale section named “The Great Gates of Kyiv”.
Pictures at an Exhibition was danced with tremendous joy and flair by a cast of ten to live music played by Reina Okada, who also provided the piano accompaniment to Scarlett’s piece.
© Teresa Guerreiro
(Banner Image credit: London City Ballet in Haieff Divertimento. Photography by ASH)
London City Ballet, Momentum was a Sadler’s Wells 13 and 14 September 2025.
The tour of Momentum continues until November. Dates here
London City Ballet: Rebirth – Robbins, Page, Ratmansky, New Tash Chu is at the RBO Linbury Theatre 19 – 22 November 2025. Details and tickets here