Review: Royal Ballet’s Visionaries pairs two inventive masterpieces, Dances at a Gathering and Song of the Earth
Once refused by the Royal Opera House board, MacMillan’s ballet returns to Covent Garden beside a Robbins classic that has been a Royal Ballet favourite since 1970.
| Title | Visionaries: Robbins and MacMillan |
| Company | The Royal Ballet |
| Venue | Royal Ballet and Opera, London |
| Date | 9 November 2026 |
| Reviewer | Jonathan Gray |
Not long after it was first performed, choreographer Jerome Robbins stated publicly – in block capitals – that there were no stories attached to his ballet Dances at a Gathering. No stories, no plots and no roles. Originally created for New York City Ballet in 1969, the ballet is a simple series of dances, set to piano music by Fryderyk Chopin, that take place before a bright blue backcloth on a bare stage. As if coming together on a brilliant summer’s day, the cast enter the stage and begin to dance, and their steps often incorporate folk-like inflections that are perhaps inspired by the country of the composer’s birth. The dances consist of solos, duets, trios, and more, and suggest friendship, romance, games, jokes, rivalry, comradeship and, at the end, a poignant sense of melancholy.
What makes the ballet so special is the constant invention of Robbins’s choreography, surprising you again and again with its musicality and dexterity, and the sheer cornucopia of steps, patterns and combinations. I love it all, and am always moved by the final Nocturne, in which the cast gather on the stage. One kneels, and another bends to touch the floor. Then, as a group, they look out into the audience and move their heads as one from left to right, as if taking in a view or watching a vapour trail across the sky. It is a beautiful moment of community and shared experience. A delight from start to finish, Robbins is right; although there is no story, Dances at a Gathering is a ballet in which anything and everything could happen.
Dances at a Gathering has had a special place in The Royal Ballet’s repertoire ever since it was first performed by the company in 1970, by an all-star cast that included Rudolf Nureyev, Antoinette Sibley, Anthony Dowell, David Wall, Lynn Seymour and Monica Mason. Although it is not often performed by the company now, it is good to welcome it back to Covent Garden, and the current revival, which opened on 9 November, has been staged by Ben Huys with care and dedication. When it is ‘overdone’, as can sometimes be the case, Dances at a Gathering can verge dangerously on sentimentality, but the current cast, thankfully, manage to avoid this. As always, individuals shone out. Marcelino Sambé, dancing at the very height of his powers, brought charm and technical ease to everything he performed, and Anna Rose O’Sullivan lit up the stage with her bright personality. Lauren Cuthbertson, in the role originally taken here by Lynn Seymour, was daffy and dizzy, and Mayara Magri, Joseph Sissens, Yasmine Naghdi, Reece Clarke, Leticia Dias, Luca Acri and Harris Bell all impressed with their fine dancing. The excellent pianist was Leonardo Pierdomenico.
Dances at a Gathering was first performed by The Royal Ballet when the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was company director. Completing the second half of Visionaries: Robbins and MacMillan was another masterpiece, MacMillan’s Song of the Earth. Very different in tone and theme, the choreography is as inventive and imaginative as the Robbins’, but whereas Dances at a Gathering, dressed in pastel colours by Joe Eula, is all about life, Song of the Earth is overshadowed by death. Its designs, in shades of black, grey and brown, are by MacMillan’s long-term collaborator, Nicholas Georgiadis.
Performed to Gustav Mahler’s great Das Lied von der Erde, the work was refused by the Board of Directors of the Royal Opera House when MacMillan first suggested it. Instead, in 1965 he made Song of the Earth on the Stuttgart Ballet, which proved such a success that within six months of its premiere the Royal Opera House Board had to backtrack and it was finally staged at Covent Garden.
Taking inspiration from the words of the Chinese poems of the Tang dynasty that Mahler set to music, MacMillan’s stylised, stark, expressionistic, almost calligraphic choreography shows a male figure, masked and dressed in black, and named the Messenger of Death, move amongst the other dancers. He is at once one of them, but also entirely separate, his movements sinuous and sinister. Throughout the six songs, the presence of death has a kind of inevitability about it, which comes to the fore in the final, deeply moving section of the ballet when the Messenger comes between a Man and a Woman and claims the Man for himself. Left alone, the Woman laments her loss in a sequence of shattering bourrées, only to be joined once more by the Messenger and the Man, now also masked, who offer her existence in eternity as the curtain slowly falls.
Song of the Earth received a strong performance by The Royal Ballet, with the lissom, slippery William Bracewell making much of the Messenger. Cuban-born Patricio Revé, a marvellous dancer, was still finding his way into MacMillan’s expressionist style of choreography but offered the Woman of Marianela Nuñez superb support in their pas de deux. Nuñez danced immaculately, although I found her, perhaps, a little too lightweight in the final moments to truly break your heart. In supporting roles, Sae Maeda and Mayara Magri made good impressions, and there was an ovation from the audience for the sturdy tenor, John Findon, and the outstanding mezzo soprano, Beth Taylor.
The pairing of these two great works means that Visionaries is the one unmissable programme to be performed by The Royal Ballet this autumn. Buy your tickets before it sells out.
