[Review] Rome Opera Ballet perform de Bana, Forsythe and ‘Women’ a new work by Juliano Nunes
A contemporary triple bill at Rome Opera saw Patrick de Bana and William Forsythe sharing the bill, with a new work from Brazilian choreographer Juliano Nunes.
Nunes is from Rio de Janeiro but studied at the Akademie des Tanzes in Mannheim. He has danced with companies such as Gauthier Dance and Leipzig Ballet, and is currently with the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen in Antwerp. At 34, he is still dancing but has created pieces for Marie-Agnès Gillot, Svetlana Lunkina and Evan Mckie, and for Acosta Danza, Pennsylvania Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, the Mariinsky, Opernhaus Zürich, and others and he was also the choreographer for the Netflix series Tiny Pretty Things. He created Interlinked for Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2022 (“Balancing appeal to a mass-market audience with stretching ballet’s mould,” said The Guardian) and a piece with Lauren Cuthbertson and Marcelino Sambé for The Royal Ballet’s New Work New Music programme in 2019 (and here’s a quote to treasure from the Financial Times: Cuthbertson and Sambé “were often defeated by pairwork that looked like a man wrestling with a rogue deckchair”.)
So even if you haven’t heard his name before, Nunes is certainly a busy dance creator, and his Women for Rome is quite special, featuring a 25-strong female team. They were dressed identically with bright red pointe shoes leading into red unitards which blended to dark grey and then became skin coloured from the waist up with gauzy wrappings that softened the upper body. Whether it was intended or not, the red shoes led to an immediate connection with the manifestations for the elimination of violence against women.
Nunes chose one of the go-to composers for modern dance, with some heart-wrenching music from Ezio Bosso. It was a selection from four works, and a winning one. Some powerful and challenging choreography for the ensemble melted into tender duos which revealed beautiful shapes without ever popping joints out of place. Rebecca Bianchi and Alessandra Amato were the poetic main dancers, though truly, it is an ensemble piece.
Women is plotless but there were many stories to be imagined, whereas Patrick de Bana’s Windgames didn’t conjure up any stories and, at 40 minutes, I found it a little tedious. But I think that it must be just me.
Windgames has been seen for more than a decade. It started life using the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto Op. 35 for the Vienna State Ballet in 2013. De Bana added the second movement in 2017 for the Shanghai Ballet and finally the third in 2021 with the Tokyo City Ballet. Yes, it’s definitely just me.
I like de Bana. I called his The Labyrinth of Solitude at La Scala “magical”. But Windgames didn’t push any buttons. The inspiration was apparently his love for the Ballets Russes and Vaslav Nijinsky. Hmm. After a few steps in silence, some slightly tuneless whistling followed. The evening was to recorded music, but maybe the whistling was live – whatever, some of it was flat, so going against the beautiful playing that followed, though I couldn’t find a credit for the violinist. A small group of dancers ran on several times, arms by their sides, under a slowly moving projection like a 1990s screensaver. They often spread out into an evenly laid out formation, and stayed within their allotted stage space performing some very sloppy ‘coordinated’ movements until they rushed off again.
There is certainly a rich choreographic palette in use, with classical steps, contemporary contractions, clenched fists, and so on – but full of sound and fury, yet signifying…? Well, it signified a little more during the more intimate sections, and some of the complex pas de deux, especially with Claudio Cocino, Rebecca Bianchi and Valerio Marisca in Red, and Marianna Suriano and Beatrice Foddi in Blue. Agnès Letestu designed the costumes, and gave the women long gauzy ballgowns which floated effectively.
As a crowd-pleasing, sure-hit finale, the programme finished with William Forsythe’s Playlist for twelve men (it came after Nunes’ all-female Women). This is Playlist (Track 1, 2), commissioned by Tamara Rojo for English National Ballet in 2018, not the revised Playlist (EP) for Boston Ballet. Forsythe has the cool approach of a master who does not need to prove his worth, and uses standard classroom steps in the most demanding way, pushing the dancers towards taxing athleticism. Of course, after performing the most challenging sequences, they often gave the Forsythe shrug and ambled off the stage.
The electronic dance music beat of Peven Everett’s Surely Shorty, followed by a Jax Jones remix of Lion Babe’s Impossible, is guaranteed to make the audience clap and whoop like at an ice-skating competition, which unfortunately gives the atmosphere of an end-of-term show. However, there’s nothing like going out with a bang, and Andrea D’Ottavio, Alessio Rezza and Alessandro Vinci brought it on, leading the pack in an explosion of testosterone-fuelled energy.
…I couldn’t stop thinking about the red shoes though…
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
