I first encountered Andrew McNicol’s work in 2014 as part of a programme of five short pieces by New English Ballet Theatre. His contribution, Kreutzer Sonata, ended the programme on a high for me and demonstrated his close affinity with music.
Tonight, he goes one better by commissioning a score from Jeremy Birchall for the final piece, Liquid Life, the new work preceded by short excerpts from three of his earlier creations, musicality and beats at their core.
Bates Beats refers to Mason Bates’s music, a blend of electronica and orchestra driving its propulsive dance rhythms and sharp beats. I am not familiar with his work, but do have a relative who works in a similar synthesizer ballpark, so I’m conditioned, and I love this. Dancers in Louise Flanagan’s classical tutus and leotards remind me of William Forsythe’s dynamic, and a strong street-style confidence. Yaron Abulafia’s dark lighting creates a sultry club atmosphere.
Moonbend, to music by Seattle-based Perfume Genius (real name Michael Hadreas)—the lyrics matter—is another club scene, gay perhaps, some dancers in wet-look leather hot pants and transparent black tops on a floor stippled by light. Again, they are dynamite, the duets demanding and daring, conflicted, with maybe a breathlessly hopeful Flashdance dreamscape…
From electric guitar to the VOCES8 Choral Ensemble and strings… Of Silence is quite different. Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks wrote his The Fruit of Silence choral work (2013) to a prayer by Mother Teresa (his father was Baptist pastor). It’s a divine offering. A couple, he bare-chested she in light shift, pledge spiritual support in soulful quietude.
After a behind the scenes film, directed by Nauris Buksevics (of Poetry Film Productions), we come to McNicol’s latest work, new this year, the half-hour-long Liquid Life. Abulafia’s lighting has already made a nod to Rothko abstract colour-field paintings, here Flanagan’s costumes in shades of Rothko red seem to point directly to his work.
Dancers Gabriel Arango, Winnie Dias, Laura Flugel, Theo Greenfield, Hamish Longley, Giulia Neri, Casey Nokomis Pereira and James Stephens interpret Birchall’s new musical commission (musicians Dominic Moore, Nicholas Holland, Brian Wright and Emil Chakalov on the stage), a blend of synthesizer and classical (lovely strings), and for some reason it seems familiar. There are American voices in this reverberating soundscape, a film score, but I can’t make out what they are saying. Is it about space travel, the dancers its atoms and particles?
Lighting is dark; the floor dappled… Strips of light appear—landing strips? Or is my imagination running away with me? Abulafia’s geometric lighting floor patterns are Malevich Suprematism. Abstract yet soulful, again the choreography (his most ambitious yet, he says) seems to be Forsythe-adjacent.
I see Crystal Pite, too. Beats kick in, funky beats, and the moves become formation, more spontaneous. Lights change to only sidelights, the floor clears and the dancers let go. Dance for dance’s sake. The past and the present seem to commune in no man’s land. Are they spirits? McNicol says it’s about human connection and resilience.
McNicol Ballet Collective is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a (already elapsed, 29 March) visit to Hull (from where he hails, I believe), today in London and 12 April in Leeds. It seems he is in demand worldwide. A former Royal Ballet student and recipient of the Kenneth MacMillan Choreographic Award, he knew from an early age he wanted to be a choreographer. He has pursued an ambitious trajectory since. He is quietly amazing, and focussed.