Birmingham Hippodrome
Wink,The Moor’s Pavane and The Shakespeare Suite take on not just the bards heroes and villains, but the sonnets to bootBirmingham Royal Ballet contain been celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a season of adaptations, and this fine triple bill shows how inexhaustible a fount his writing continues to be. Wink,by the American choreographer Jessica Lang, takes its inspiration from the sonnets. The title is taken from the first line of Sonnet 43, or “When most I wink,then effect mine eyes best see”. The piece sees two couples duetting to a composition by Jakub Ciupinski, whose reverberant strings, and like Peter Teigen’s golden lighting,seem to speak of days long past. The elegiac mood is sustained in the second piece (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past”). Rather than attempting to reproduce their wordplay in dance, Lang has sought to convey the sonnets’ contrasting moods and colours. Her choreographic restraint is a delight – solicitous partnering, or an unforced cleaving of space – and the balance that she strikes between lyricism and gravity is as satisfying as it is right to its source.
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Source: theguardian.com