Popular Hero

Carlos Acosta with guest artists from the Royal Ballet
Coliseum
London, England
31 March – 3 April, 2008

by Judith Cruickshank
copyright 2008 by Judith Cruickshank

It took Carlos Acosta to fill the London Coliseum. The third presentation in the Spring Dance season, “Carlos Acosta with guest artists from the Royal Ballet” was greeted with hardly an empty seat in sight. And to judge by overheard comments from the people around me, many of the audience were not regular ballet-goers but knew of Acosta through his appearances on television or had heard the radio serialisation of his autobiography.

The evening was a repeat of a programme given in 2006 at Sadler's Wells, but with some different casting. It is made up of a series of pas de deux and solos and finishes with a jolly piece of Spanishery for four couples. What makes it different from the usual gala programme is that it opens with the dancers in warm-up clothes walking onto the bare stage and settling themselves down to stretch and warm up while the orchestra plays an overture. We get glimpses of them making ready between the numbers that make up the first half and the transition between onstage and offstage persona continues throughout the evening; bows taken, applause acknowledged, the performers simply walk off the stage as themselves, rather than making a choreographed exit.

There are just eight dancers in addition to Acosta: Caroline Duprot, Mara Galeazzi, Sara Lamb and Tamara Rojo plus Martin Harvey, Valeri Hristov and José Martin. Lauren Cuthbertson was a last minute replacement for Zenaida Yanowski who withdrew for the happiest of reasons; she and her husband, the baritone Simon Keenleyside are expecting their first child.

Good as this sounds it was with a few exceptions a disappointing evening. Either good choreography was not danced well enough or the choreography was simply not good enough. Cuthbertson, for instance, looked neither happy nor secure partnered by Acosta in the pas de deux from “Agon” while dancing with style and confidence in a solo by Will Tuckett which was simply not worthy of the time she had clearly given to learning and rehearsing it

Galeazzi and Harvey gave a remarkably passionless account of Kenneth MacMillan's “Winter Dreams” duet and Harvey later partnered the lovely Duprot in a number by Ben Stevenson about which the least said the better. Lamb fared little better with a duet made up of bleeding chunks from Act II of “La Sylphide” danced in almost total darkness, followed by an anemic “Dying Swan”and a wildly unsuitable number choreographed by Ben Van Cauweburgh to a recording of Edith Piaf singing “Je ne regrette rien”.

Photo:  Carlos Acosta in "Diana and Acteon pas de deux." Photo by Dee Conway.