Ballet Black is a small company that has always punched above its weight. For most of its life to date, that capability has had much to do with the incomparable star quality of Cira Robinson, who left the company, after 14 glorious years, at the end of 2022, to become artistic director of the Yorkshire Ballet Seminars. The departure of a leading dancer is profoundly felt in any company, but I took my seat at The Barbican wondering how significant a loss this would be for such a small ensemble when Robinson had been so much its leading light.
The ensuing two hours of palpable enjoyment proved that life after Cira will be different but no less auspicious. Ballet Black is nothing if not resilient and this diverse double bill evidenced that the sum is far greater than any of its parts. Two new dancers, Helga Paris-Morales and Taraja Hudson, having recently joined the team as apprentice artists, slipped seamlessly into the ensemble as if experienced professionals of several seasons’ standing (and a word too for another apprentice, Rosanna Lindsey having returned from a broken ankle to re-join the ensemble). Sayaka Ichikawa and Isabela Coracy, respectively gave eye-catching performances in each of the two parts of this Pioneers programme; and the company’s quartet of busy male dancers remain both charismatic and strong. Incidentally, earlier in the day, I learned that, after ten years, José Alves is also to leave the company at the end of this season. It really is a changing of the guard!
The big new production, co-commissioned by The Barbican, for this Ballet Black season is Mthuthuzeli November’s bio-ballet about the life of Nina Simone (the stage name of Eunice Waymon). It has clearly been a labour of love (the programme carries a two-page emotional letter from November to his cultural heroine) and it carries both the benefits and the drawbacks of such devotion.
It is quite a task to transfer a glimmer of Simone’s gifted and turbulent life into a one-act ballet and November’s Nina: By Whatever Means succeeds only after a difficult start where too much emphasis is placed upon Eunice’s childhood and her thwarted ambition to become a classical pianist. Although theatrically appropriate as a background to Simone’s elite musicianship and the perceived racism that stopped her admission to Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, thus setting in train her journey to becoming one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time, it is too long and convoluted (including the regular shifting of a piano in and out of the space) and acts as a delayer of the dance.
For a ballet about Nina Simone there was also a surprising lack of her wonderful voice with much of the score being a new composition by November himself, working with Mandisi Dyantyis. To my mind this worked far less well than the two songs sung by Simone: Mood Indigo and her self-composed Sinnerman (modern catnip to choreographers) that brought the performance to a rousing finale. I thoroughly disliked the male vocals that accompanied the domestic abuse scene between Simone and her volatile husband (portrayed by Alexander Fadayiro) whilst acknowledging that this discordance was a valid artistic choice.
Isabela Coracy’s performance as Simone was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate that Ballet Black has a new star and she rose to the challenge with a rich mix of elegant allure and magnetic stage presence. It’s a role with which she will now be forever associated and rightly so. A special mention, too, must go to Sienne Adotey, a young dancer on the Ballet Black Associate programme, for her ebullient portrayal of the young Eunice as a piano student, taught by Miss Massy (Sayaka Ichikawa).
Ichikawa is now the longest serving of the Ballet Black dancers and her special delicacy of movement was particularly notable in the early revival of Will Tuckett’s Then or Now (first performed in 2020). Tuckett’s fluid and poetic choreography was performed to a mix of solo violin, a recording of Daniel Pioro playing 450-year-old music by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber and recorded readings of the later poetry of Adrienne Rich; selected from the 1995 anthology Dark Fields of the Republic, described in the frontispiece as being “of dreams and nightmares, conversations actual and imaginary”.
Kudos to Tuckett for creating musical patterns in his choreographic interpretation of these words and their meaning intertwined with the musicality in his elucidation of Pioro’s lyrical performance. It’s not surprising that Then or Now has made such a quick return. Not only did it provide the perfect, refreshing palette-cleanser for the complex and heavy material of the bio-ballet but it is such a pleasing and uncomplicated exposition of expressive neoclassical ballet that it ought to become a regular revival in the Ballet Black repertoire.
