Last Updated on November 16, 2025
The Marriage of Music and Movement
3.0 out of 5.0 starsSomething old, something new, something borrowed… The Royal Ballet’s first triple bill of the season, Perspectives, marries a seminal old work by George Balanchine, his 1934 Serenade, to modern-day New York in Justin Peck’s 2014 Everywhere We Go, now acquired by the Royal Ballet, by way of a brand new piece by Cathy Marston entitled Against the Tide. The thread running through the entire programme is all three choreographers’ very specific approach to their music.
Serenade comes first.
Balanchine choreographed Serenade for the students of his newly-formed School of American Ballet, and when the New York City Ballet came into being the following decade, he adapted it for a professional company. A masterpiece of abstract, neo-classical dance, it’s now performed by companies far and wide.
Set to Tchaikovsky’s ‘Serenade for Strings’, Balanchine’s Serenade is an almost miraculous fusion of music and dance. Balanchine’s much-quoted diktat: “see the music, hear the dance” finds full expression here, and it’s glorious to watch.
It’s danced on a bare, blue-lit stage by a corps of 17 with four soloists and five principals. The women wear ethereal costumes with long white skirts tinged with the merest hint of sky blue. Basic academic steps gradually gain in difficulty; the ever-changing formations for the corps show Balanchine’s crafty way of dealing with the varying numbers of students available to him at any given time.
The soloists cut through the corps formations in the allegro sections; in the first cast, Fumi Kaneko was a sparkling presence, taking flight with her soaring grand jetés.
She was partnered by Vadim Muntagirov, their obvious enjoyment of dancing together adding a hint of spice to the proceedings; Melissa Hamilton and Ryoichi Hirano brought a very sensual gravitas to their adagio; and Leticia Dias offered buoyant, joyous solos.
Cathy Marston, currently the Artistic Director of Ballet Zürich, is best known as the prolific choreographer of meticulous, detailed narrative works, such as The Cellist, her 2020 account of Jacqueline du Pré’s cruelly short life, which was her first commission for the RBO main stage. In Against the Tide, though, she stepped out of her comfort zone to create a work which, she says, was dictated by the music.
She was inspired by Benjamin Britten’s ‘Violin Concerto’ and the fact that it was written at the end of the 1930s, as Europe hurtled towards World War II.
One young man, William Bracewell on opening night, stands alone against a forbidding stone bridge, his movement closely mirroring the solo violin. A second man, Matthew Ball, enters. It’s clear he brings some kind of temptation: their duet is intense, accentuating Ball’s dominance, Bracewell’s neediness.
A group of young men, led by a uniformed Nicol Edmonds, bursts onto the stage. They, too, want to entice the young man, but although curious, he resists. They go, and a female figure (the wonderful Melissa Hamilton) appears. She brings comfort, but then leaves. Ball enters again, ever more insistent, but then the gang of young men, all now in uniform, return.
It ends with Bracewell slowly crossing the bridge.
Marston, assisted by dramaturg Edward Kemp, provides a nebulous narrative, but it’s hard to decide what she is actually telling us. And although the movement draws intimately from Britten’s transporting Concerto, with the superb Vasco Vassiliev on solo violin, Britten never explicitly linked his composition to the looming disaster, so the music doesn’t offer any useful hints either.
Against the Tide is, I fear, a very unsatisfactory work, despite being danced with belief and commitment.
Justin Peck, Resident Choreographer of New York City Ballet, has won a raft of awards for his work on Broadway, and the sheer vibrancy and pizzazz of Broadway infuses much of his work, specifically Everywhere We Go.
A 40-minute piece, where Peck’s ideas and movement were developed side by side with Sufjan Stevens’s especially commissioned score, Everywhere We Go relies on mathematics and geometry for both movement and visual composition: Karl Jensen’s set, a backcloth displaying lines of askew squares, whose surface is animated by Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting design, and Janie Taylor costumes, marked by thin black and white horizontal stripes.
It’s a fast-moving, high-energy work in nine movements, dancers flowing on and off stage, ensemble giving way to duets and trios. Soloists are lost in the crowd before coming into their own: Reece Clarke and Marianela Nuñez mastering the slow movement, Mayara Magri and Luca Acri boisterous and mischievous, Sae Maeda and Daichi Ikarashi light and bright, and Viola Pantuso coping well with demanding solos.
Peck’s very American style, his skilful blend of ballet and Broadway, uniquely suits American dancers’ speed and attack, something that comes naturally to them, but not so much to foreign companies.
The Royal Ballet dancers undoubtedly did well in the final piece of Perspectives, but they’re not quite there yet.
Perspectives: Balanchine, Marston, Peck is in repertoire at the RBO from 14 November 2025 to 2 December 2025
RBO
Bow Street
Covent Garden
London WC2E 9DD
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