London City Ballet: Firebird - Northern Arts Review
A mixed bill at York Theatre Royal
London City Ballet: Firebird A Mixed Bill - Northern Arts Review
Double bills live or die in their curation. If you put two beautiful pieces side-by-side, then you just have two beautiful pieces. If you face them towards one another and make them speak, you have a conversation. As an audience member, the fun is in spotting where they meet and where they pull apart. London City Ballet’s Firebird – A Mixed Bill could hardly offer two more visually distinctive worlds. In Ghost Light, our world is stripped back to a singular bulb and a discarded chair. We watch as the echoes of stories come to life in brief, fleeting bursts, examining memory and loss. In Firebird, we are transported to the dark forests of a gothic fairytale and the story of a woman straining against the constraints of her family, reaching towards freedom and expression. Both pieces are linked by the past: the first looking backwards and honouring what has come before, the second bursting out and grasping at the future with both hands.
The programme brings together John Neumeier’s Ghost Light, originally created for Hamburg Ballet in 2020 and newly reworked for London City Ballet, with Glen Tetley’s 1981 reimagining of Firebird. Written during lockdown, Ghost Light imagines the impressions of hundreds of performances, now silenced, with only a ghost light left to remember them. In Firebird, Tetley takes Stravinsky’s famous 1910 ballet and shifts its original Russian folktale into an Edwardian family drama. The magical Firebird is no longer a mythic creature, but a young woman attempting to break free from rigid expectation. The pairing fits neatly with London City Ballet’s wider mission under Artistic Director Christopher Marney: a small, deliberately tourable company bringing rarely seen repertoire back to regional stages. With little in the way of conventional scenery, both pieces demonstrate just how much atmosphere can be wrung from simple lights and bodies.
Ghost Light is a story that begins with absence. We are greeted with a bare stage, an overturned chair and a single light, a ghost light, still left burning. Alina Cojocaru enters as Odette, dressed for Swan Lake, moving for several minutes in near complete silence, only pleading with the audience before catching on the chair and eventually, in sadness, folding herself onto the floor. Later, her Prince (Josue Gomez) arrives, waking her. Soon, they are joined by a stream of performers, each blending and smudging into the scene from their own stories and their own moments in time. Eventually, we watch as Odette strips away her costume onstage, and with it, the line between rehearsal and performance, audience and performer, evaporates.
To see my full review, please visit Northern Arts Review
See you in the shadows my loves,
Sean x
