Ballet audiences have so far been tolerant of the glitches affecting the reopened Opera House. OK, the Christmas tree didn't always grow for the Royal Ballet's opening performances of The Nutcracker, and the trap doors didn't always work, but most of the public was in a holiday mood, and there was a kind of British doggedness about struggling on which struck a chord.
But on Thursday night, when the Royal Ballet started their performance half an hour late and, after a second interval of nearly an hour, had to cancel the concluding ballet, Ashley Page's Hidden Variables, the normally sedate audience booed and yelled.
The problem was the late dismantling of an opera set, which had been used in rehearsals during Thursday afternoon. It wasn't a simple case of incompetence, more a reflection of a scheduling policy that alternates ballet and opera performances back to back instead of giving productions separate runs. But it overshadowed much of what did appear on stage.
The performance was a remix of the programme of international ballet with which the company began its season in December, and outstanding among the new dancers and choreographers was American Ballet Theatre's Ethan Steifel, partnering Susan Jaffe in a pas de deux from Twyla Tharp's Known by Heart. The work is set to a percussion score with the strident beat of a street carnival, and the dancers surf upon characteristically Tharpian extremes of vernacular and virtuoso dance.
Jaffe started out looking jittery but by the end of the duet had loosened into a stylish mix of acerbic wit and ballerina delicacy. Steifel, however, was a star from the moment he stepped onstage. Veering from louche mobster to ballet prince, he flipped between outrageously sly insinuations of his hips to elegantly cocky strings of pirouettes. His timing was faultless and his demeanour entrancing.
The other new choreography was William Forsythe's The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, which could be subtitled Bill's Mischief. Confounding his own antichrist image as arch desecrator of classical principles, Forsythe's surprising little show-stopper proves he can do ballet like the best of them. Not only is the work set to the impeccably classical music of Schubert (rather than Forsythe's preferred electronic scores) but its five dancers are spun through almost every classroom step in the book.
As the title suggests, this is an outright celebration of the precision and speed unique to ballet, but it's also a wicked exaggeration. Familiar steps become barely visible as they race on each others heels, change direction and then link in perilous combinations. Forsythe contains the whole breathtaking flurry within a very untypical classical decorum, and the audience loved it.
They also loved Darcey Bussell, despite the fact that she was performing Peter Martin's silly duet from his Barber Violin Concerto. This is a piece blighted by a vaguely fraught feeling and by hangdog male posturing, but Bussell used all her technical subtlety and power to give texture to the choreography, and all but convinced us she was making emotional sense of it.
