Darcey quits Covent Garden with MacMillan's Song of the Earth, but the really earthy stuff is to be found in Sadler's Wells
Royal Ballet
Covent Garden, London WC2
Phoenix Dance
Theatre Sadler's Wells, London EC1
On Friday, Darcey Bussell bade farewell to classical ballet and to the Royal Opera House audience who have loved her so faithfully. It was in a Kenneth MacMillan work, Prince of the Pagodas, that the 20-year-old Bussell danced her first starring role; 18 years later, it was in MacMillan's Song of the Earth that she appeared here for the last time. There was no special planning in this: the piece was scheduled some time before she announced her departure.
That said, it's hard to imagine a more elegiac swan song than Mahler's tender meditation on love and mortality. The principal roles comprise a trio: the Man (Gary Avis), the Woman (Bussell) and the Messenger (Carlos Acosta). The latter, a shadowy presence throughout the ballet, is an envoy of Death. He is also a companion and guide, however, and while composer and choreographer express the inevitability of his embrace, both also promise renewal. Death, the ballet tells us, is not an end, nor is it to be feared.
Bussell is beautiful in the piece, as she always has been, carried weightlessly on the music's austere symphonic currents and inscribing MacMillan's steps with serene gravity. The role, a perfect synthesis of line and emotion, was originally created on Stuttgart ballet's Marcia Haydee. It's softer and quieter on Bussell, but no less poignant; you can see why she became such an important late-life muse to the choreographer. One moment in particular strikes straight to the heart: Bussell's character thinks she is dancing alone and gives us soaring flashes of her 20-year-old self. But behind her, inexorably mirroring her every move, is the black-clad figure of Acosta's Messenger. Even for Bussell, the bell tolls. At the curtain call, the audience didn't want to let her go, cheering and calling her name in an outpouring of affection until, still girlish in her white tunic, she just slipped away.
If Song of the Earth was MacMillan's masterpiece, Symphonic Variations, which preceded it, was Frederick Ashton's. Created in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, this abstract piece has a elusive subtext. During the war years, Ashton had sought refuge from the grimness of service life in the writing of Christian mystics and in Cesar Franck's score, he found an echo of what St John of the Cross called the 'inward peace' of the soul. The ballet's backcloth, by Sophie Fedorovitch, evokes the luminous green of the English countryside in spring, while the costumes recall a lost Arcadia.
To these elements, in which the religious and the pastoral come to a very English accommodation, Ashton applied choreography of, at first glance, great simplicity. In fact, its high, clear lifts, piercing stillnesses and lyrical circlets of jetes are the result of intense distillation. Each phrase succeeds the last with quiet inevitability, as if it could be no other way, and both we and the dancers know it. The atmosphere is extraordinarily potent - within minutes, audience members were reaching for the handkerchiefs they'd brought for Bussell - but it depends on the dancers getting the tone exactly right. The piece is one of the hardest and most exposing in the repertoire and for its 20-minute duration, its six-strong cast are rarely still and never off stage.
Of the first nighters, Federico Bonelli is his handsome and chivalrous self, Roberta Marquez has a subtly over-sweet edge and Steven McRae's competitiveness looks a whisker off-message. Best is Belinda Hatley, whose delicate upper-body work and precisely pitched romanticism have long identified her as one of the company's prime Ashton stylists. This is Hatley's final season with the Royal Ballet and here, in the greatest Ashton work of them all, she dances straight from the heart, her performance an uncontained rush of joy.
A smaller masterpiece was brought to Sadler's Wells by Phoenix Dance Theatre, in its first London season under new director Javier de Frutos. Harmonica Breakdown, a three-and-a-half-minute solo to blues music by Sonny Terry, was choreographed in 1938 by Jane Dudley. The piece portrays the struggle of the sharecroppers of the Depression, but it's much wiser and funnier than that suggests, its keynote being a smooth, indomitable, front-projected trudge that's halfway to a Michael Jackson moonwalk.
Dudley, who was white, made the piece for herself, but the breakdown was a late 19th-century African-American dance, and by mounting it on Kialea-Nadine Williams, who's black, de Frutos ties the piece to Phoenix's origins in black community dance, and reminds us just how far this Leeds-based ensemble has come.
Harmonica was prefaced by Henri Oguike's Signal. Tribal in mood, it presents the dancers as a series of individuals united by ritual. From the opening passage featuring Lisa Welham, one of the most powerful dancers on the British contemporary scene today, to its hypnotic ending, this is pure Phoenix.
Paseillo is pure de Frutos. Set to a scratchy record of Mozart intercut with A Hawaiian Farewell, this takes the form of a battle of the sexes. The men seem to be dressed as Sufi princes, the women as governesses. The exchanges are elaborate, fragrant and homoerotic, with the men tongue-kissing each other even as they hoist the women into the air above them. In de Frutos's work, men are impelled by deep forces and women fit in where they can. Los Picadores, another de Frutos piece, is Fight Club set to a tortured version of Stravinsky's Les Noces, and macho to the point of absurdity. Fans of prison-rape movies may enjoy the blood-caked Y-fronts, but others will wish they'd called it a night with Paseillo.