The Royal Ballet’s Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor’s “Raven Girl” (2013), and Principal Character Artist and choreographer Alastair Marriott’s “Connectome” (2014), return to the Royal Opera House to open the new season as a mixed programme.Raven Girl is the graphic novel by award-winning writer Audrey Niffenegger created especially for adaptation by McGregor as his first narrative full-length ballet. It tells the story of a Postman and a female Raven who, after falling in love with one another, bring a Raven Girl into life. Art historian Martin Kempt would have wondered, “is she a humanized animal or an animalized human?”The Raven Girl has the soul of a bird trapped inside human form. Neither fully the one, nor properly the other, she is unfulfilled with her hybrid nature. With no wings and near entirely mute, able to utter only raven calls, she longs of soaring into the air like her mother. She meets a Doctor who is willing to make her dream come true. But, will this result in regression or to perfection?In this gothic ballet, the issue of identity and transformation, and of being trapped in one’s own body, recalls Virginia Woolf’s Orlando - which inspired the second act of McGregor’s previous “Wolf Works” (2015). In Niffenegger’s modern day fairy tale, however, although there is a love story, a woman-bird and a prince - like in many nineteenth-century classics - the “Raven Girl” reflects the world we live in today, beyond the chimeras of the past and at a time when medical science has superseded them, taking on the literal meaning of body modification and the myriad possibilities of plastic surgery. In search of otherness, today sees a boom in such procedures now regarded as normative, at least in the Western world. “Raven Girl” is fleshed out in ways that mark the hybrids that encompass the society of our times.Shortly after principal Edward Watson, as Postman, enters the stage atop his bicycle, he discovers an unusual letter and a feather, and makes his way to the addressee. Upon arrival to the Raven’s Nest in the Otherworld, this feather becomes a leitmotiv; enlarged, it is used as a prop by the dancers cast as Ravens filling the stage and swirling it like a ribbon of rhythmic gymnastics, with Cunningham-esque moves that recall his “Beach Birds” (1993), and with projections of ravens in flight overhead, turning the stage into that striking scene in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (1963).There, he finds a Raven that has fallen off from her nest, takes her home with him and they each fall in love with the other. A projected animation of a nest constructing itself, an egg within its centre, conjures a surreal tone. A bed on stage is blanketed by a heap of envelopes which grows in synchronicity with the egg above it, and which suddenly turns into a Man Ray-like blinking-eye. In the blink of our own eye, the Raven Girl appears on stage, cast by the flawless principal Sarah Lamb, in accompaniment to Ravi Deepres’ projection resembling Etienne-Jules Marey’s plate from the photographic gun with twelve views of a gull in flight.Left all alone, the Raven Girl enters a dark dream of longing, with a conspiracy of Ravens closing in, swirling around her with that very feather, that symbolizes her flightless torment, with the sound of passerines’ toes scratching the ground, resounding her desire for flight. An open window-cum-aerial hoop descends in front of her, as a limen, to prelude her rite of passage. Before entering, she follows a kind of Forsythe object-dance, climbing onto a pile of chairs that are placed atop a table, arching her back and fluttering her arms, then jumps on to the hoop and experiments with exhilarating aerial feats. The preliminal rite ends with her leaving her family behind to enter the university.It is there that she encounters a plastic surgeon during a lecture he was giving on chimeras. His slide projection of curiosities moves away to reveal three dancers dressed in Houdini-like straightjackets, as a metaphor and to reflect upon the Raven Girl’s body-imprisonment and emotional identity crisis. Artist Stelarc, known for his prosthetic ear (“Extra Ear,” 2007), remarked that Kant could not foresee that “chimeras would one day exist as objects of experience.” The Raven Girl has found her man, so to speak. During a brief but elegant pas de deux with the Doctor, who is cast by Thiago Soares, she arranges to visit his practice. Lucy Carter’s lighting lends a cinematic atmosphere; Greenaway-like, with the transition from blue - upon the meeting - to the operation room’s surgical green light, as an overture to the liminal rite that is to come. On the right, is a glass cabinet where the pair of potential wings is displayed, and on the left, a surgical bed, where Raven Girl is lying anaesthetized. With features and locomotion similar to Doctor Coppelius, the Doctor grabs the Raven Girl, whilst she is unresponsive, and totes her across the stage in a somehow manipulative macabre dance, following a score of metallic sounds, dark and painful to listen to. Projected is an anatomical female figure in mutability, growing wings onto its arm, as the operation is taking place.For the post-liminal rite, the Raven Girl re-enters the stage with a new identity, and in a passerine-like glide, finds herself before a mirror. Like the raven’s typical cruciform shape when in flight, she arches her back and spreads her elaborate wings in pure admiration and excitement. For just a second, that terrible film, “Black Swan,” springs to mind. Her prosthetic wings are designed by Vicki Mortimer as an exoskeleton, in a similar fashion to the body extensions that Rebecca Horn created in the late 60s, with which the performer’s self-perception was transformed.The final act is almost like a new story, altogether. Oscar-winning film composer Gabriel Yard is now plumbing the emotional depths of the ballet, with a mix of orchestra and electronics to reach a climax of happily ever after. Prince Raven, cast by soloist Eric Underwood, appears all of a sudden to take on the future of the Raven Girl, as the two become one during their short act on the spinning aerial hoop. In a typical McGregor sequence, they land on stage with their bodies sensually sliding on to one another, following a passionate dance full of embraces, lifts and fluidity.Ambiguously enough, we do not know if, at the end, the Raven Girl has given up on her wings, or if she took them off for practical reasons. Prince Raven has no wings either. Did they, perhaps, transform into humans?With no exceptional choreography – other than the last pas de deux - and with - although charming and relevant - too many allusions and visual effects, McGregor’s struggle to unravel a story shows from the start, for it is hard to follow the narrative even if you have read the book in advance.For the second part of this mixed programme, we move on to Alastair Marriott’s neuroscience-inspired “Connectome” (2014). In Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, Sebastian Seung projects on the idea that the wiring of our brain - so called, connectomes - play an integral part in shaping our identity. Don’t expect to understand his concept by watching the ballet. Just enjoy the view.After the fairy tale’s darkness, we are blinded by Es Devlin’s sparkling, kinetic rods descending from above, while a cast of seven dancers jump high and shoot in between them, before ascending to break the spell of this visual paradox that recalls Jesús Rafael Soto’s sculptures. Principal Lauren Cuthbertson is apt for the role of this emotional woman, who through love and sorrow is lost and found in space and time. Together with principals, Steven McRae and Edward Watson, and a corps of four males, she gallops and casts brain-graph inspired configurations set to an enigmatic score by Arvo Pärt, until her final - à la Pavlova - pose. This truly poetic piece may elevate your subliminal perception as you experience a being of light and feel the lightness of being.To 24 October 2015, at the Royal Opera House, London.
↧