The new People's Opera House is making strenuous moves to reinvent its old clubby image, but it's the Royal Ballet who seem most hopefully determined to blow away the cobwebs. The fanfare opener for the company's return season is neither a Swan Lake nor a Sleeping Beauty but a programme of newly created and international work.
Siobhan Davies, one of Britain's finest modern dance-makers should have been a natural choice to start the evening. Her previous collaboration with Deborah Bull and two other members of the Royal show how articulate and original classical dancers could look within her language. Certainly in her debut work for Covent Garden, aptly titled A Stranger's Taste, she has lovingly zeroed in on her dancers individual qualities.
Outstanding is Bruce Sansom, whose classically perfect lines are torqued into contrasts of gravely beautiful planes and glancing light. The work is elegantly constructed and charged with some fascinating currents of emotion but it's not Davies at her best.
The real problem is her choice of score, a collage of early baroque and contemporary chamber music which sounds thin and scratchy in the huge Opera House space - it would much better suited to the Royal's temporary base at Sadler's Wells than the new house.
The programme's international section is a set of dance postcards sent in by the world's celebrity choreographers, last night including Glenn Tetley, Nacho Duato, Peter Martins, John Neumeier and James Kudelka.
A series of trios and duets were shown in quick succession by performers from Canada, America, Germany and the Royal though frankly the dancing was far more memorable than the choreography. Highlights included the lyrically high-strung curve of Greta Hodgkinson's body in Tetley's Tagore, Jonathon Cope looking sleek and subtle in Duato's Remanfo, the exquisitely nuanced phrasing of Darci Kistler in Martins' duet and Darcey Bussell's feet, quivering like erotic antennae in Neumeier's title Lento.
It was left to Ashley Page to turn the evening around in his new work, Hidden Variables. This is set to music by Colin Matthews, and as soon as it sounded its opening impudent, brassy dissonances the pulse of the dance was set racing. Page's cast look magnificently erotic and knowing. They are framed and dressed by the oh-so-clever designs of Antony McDonald and gorgeously lit by Peter Mumford. Page makes stars of them all.
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