Dance Review by Edward Thorpe

ARTFULLY INTO ALIEN TERRITORY

It had been widely reported that the Royal Ballet’s guest artists from the Bolshoi Ballet, Nina Ananiashvili and Alexei Fadeyechev, were finding some difficulty in coping with Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography for the «Prince of the Pagodas», completely different in manner from the 19th - century classics they have danced so often in Russia.

However that may be, at last Friday’s performance there was no evidence of any difficulty with the alien style - rather the opposite, in fact. Both artists performed the physically taxing and technically demanding sequences with wonderful fluency and precision.

It was not only the choreography that presented difficulties: Benjamin Britten’s complex score is a challenge to every dancer. But Ananiashvili is an exceptionally musical ballerina and as Princess Belle Rose her phrasing of the steps was as clearly articulated as her execution of them was exact.

As with so many Russian dancers it was her use of head, shoulders and arms that was particularly expressive, every inclination of the head, every subtle turn of the shoulders, every extension of the arms revealed some nuance of the choreography we have not seen before, especially in her duets with the Salamander/Prince.

Fadeyechev’s dancing was brilliant and buoyant as the Prince and fascinatingly reptilian as the Salamander. Both dancers extracted the utmost from the final grand pas de deux, and Fadeyechev was in total command of the long fight with the four Kings, beating them with staves, knives, rapier and kickboxing, an astonishing piece of bravura dancing.

The supporting cast were also on top form: Deborah Bull as the vicious Princess Epine reveals the spitefulness of the character with a razor sharp technique and capricious changes of mood.

Errol Pickford, making his debut in the important part of the Fool, was consistently strong in his many strenuous solos. But he needs to develop the characterisation; it is the Fool who pushes the complicated narrative to its happy conclusion and must dominate the ballet.

A quartet of soloists, Nicola Tranah, Nicola Roberts, Sergiu Pobereznic and Simon Rice all danced superbly, both in their solos and in their closely synchronised duets, and of the four Kings I particularly liked Adam Cooper as a brutally macho King of the North and the cleverly timed sneezes of William Trevitt’s foppish King of the West.

The orchestra played unusually well under the sensitive direction of Philip Gammon who made the most of the music's incidental beauties.