The Royal Ballet, unlike some of its peers (hello, Paris Opera Ballet), isn’t known for extensive forays into contemporary European dance. But on Thursday night, a double bill that included the commission of a new work, “Salle de Danse,” by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León — well-known names on what the English still like to call “the continent” — opened at the Royal Opera House to a buzzy crowd.
Lightfoot and León occupy an interesting corner of the dance landscape. The British and Spanish pair met as young dancers at Nederlands Dans Theater, began to choreograph together there, got married and split up but have continued to work as a team. Since 1989, they have created more than 60 dances. Though their work has been picked up here and there by other companies, they have rarely created pieces outside of Nederlands Dans Theater, which Lightfoot directed from 2011 to 2020.
Now, in a program titled (cryptically) “So Are We,” they have brought their distinctive blend of stretched balletic line, contemporary curves, idiosyncratic gesture and expressionist emotiveness to the Royal Ballet. (Note to Lightfoot-León scholars: All their titles begin with an “S.”)
Lightfoot spent several years at the Royal Ballet School before joining Nederlands Dans Theater, and the duo pay homage to that time in the new “Salle de Danse,” which takes as its theme the class exercises that all ballet dancers do daily. That’s a familiar notion to ballet fans: Harald Lander’s “Études” is the best known of a small subgenre of ballets inspired by this idea. (Bournonville’s “Conservatoriet” and William Forsythe’s “Barre Project” are others.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dance has its origins in a work Lightfoot created for film during the pandemic, set to Knudage Riisager’s score for “Études.” For this iteration, Lightfoot and León commissioned a score from the Russian composer Ilya Demutsky.
His music is pleasantly serviceable, beginning with slow, string-heavy strains as the curtain slowly parts, revealing a spotlighted woman (Francesca Hayward) in a flesh-colored leotard center stage. She does slow, languorous unfoldings of her limbs, her upper body undulating, her arms extending and hands fluttering. A man (Marcellino Sambé) joins her, moving easily through balletic attitude turns before she dons a pillbox-red gown and both disappear into the shadows.
So far, so mysterious. Then comes some guidance. “I: Le Maitre et la Maitresse” (“The Master and the Mistress” — of the ballet sort) is projected on a banner overhead and a stern-looking Natalia Osipova and Matthew Ball dance with sharp, exaggerated, Charlie Chaplin-esque emphasis as the music moves into a more jovial mode.
For 19 more sections (each given the French nomenclature used by ballet dancers, like “tendu” or “ronds de jambe”) over the next hour, León and Lightfoot move through the sequence of a traditional ballet class, riffing loosely on the actual technical exercises.
In “Adage,” the section of slow, extended movements that take place in the center of the studio, two men (Calvin Richardson and Marco Masciari) lean into one another, extending their legs with slow, ripply upper-body curves. In “L’Art de la marche,” Ella Newton Severgnini and Sae Maeda move with perfect, crisp synchronicity. “Pirouettes” gets the most literal treatment with marvelous virtuosic turns from Alejandro Muñoz and Harrison Lee.
“Salle de Danse” boasts 46 dancers and a great deal of luxury casting. Aside from Osipova, Ball, Richardson, Hayward and Sambé (superb), the principals Mayara Magri, Reece Clarke, Melissa Hamilton, Marianela Nuñez, Patricio Revé and Joseph Sissens are democratically scattered throughout various sections.
Up-and-coming talents are also on vivid display. Marianna Tsembenhoi makes exhilaratingly musical sense of the speedy, abrupt “Solo Prima Ballerina”; Caspar Lench and Ravi Cannonier-Watson are touchingly lyrical in “Pas de deux romantique”; the five men of “Petit Allegro” sparkle in a section that combines vaudeville hoofing and bravura leaps.
“Salle de Danse” combines the best and worst of the Lightfoot-León brand. It’s entertaining (the audience loved it), the dancers come across like human beings (even as they perform superhuman feats) and it shows the choreographers’ belief in dance’s ability to express the strange, inchoate feelings and absurdities that bubble in the human psyche, as well as the joy of connection.
The choreography, though, is also frequently repetitive — lots of legs shooting to the sky, quirky gestures and facial contortions — and the staging sometimes portentously aestheticized. (Why does Hayward trail that long red train to her gown so slowly across the stage near the end?) That portentousness was even more pronounced in the duo’s “Shoot the Moon,” a 2006 work set to the second movement of Philip Glass’s “Tirol Concerto for Piano and Orchestra,” which opened the program.
A stylishly moody chamber piece for five dancers involving screens and a clever revolving set, it offered wonderful dancing from Anna Rose O’Sullivan, Vadim Muntagirov, Lauren Cuthbertson, Ball and Lukas B. Braendsrod, all suffering through various permutations of coupledom with much the same choreographic vocabulary that Lightfoot and León deploy in “Salle de Danse.”
Nonetheless, it was good to see the often-restrained Royal Ballet dancers throw themselves into this program with such delight and verve. Not everything needs to be a masterpiece.
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