Royal Ballet Triple Bill, Royal Opera House, London Reviewed by Zoë Anderson Wednesday, 18 May 2011

Slippy choreography: Akane Takada in 'Live Fire Exercise'

The Royal Ballet's latest triple bill piles up contrasts. It follows the champagne bubble of Balanchine's Ballo della Regina with the deliberate dislocations of Wayne McGregor's new Live Fire Exercise. It ends with the sleek dancing of Christopher Wheeldon's DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse.

The backdrop to McGregor's new work is a computer-generated landscape by the artist John Gerrard. The virtual camera circles a group of army trucks; then a huge explosion goes off. The pillar of fire burns for most of the ballet, sinking down to black smoke by the end. Six dancers perform in front of this image. The music is Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli.

The different components are almost disconnected from each other, but not quite. McGregor's steps, softer and less driven than much of his choreography, pull the dancers into twists of movement.

Tippet's music, pastoral with complications, knots and resolves. The dance slides past the score, with steps resolving just after the music does. It's a surprise when Lauren Cuthbertson dives into Eric Underwood's arms, a swinging lift that matches the music's phrasing.

The choreography is the slippiest aspect of Live Fire Exercise. Gerrard's and Tippett's work are strongly characterised, desert war and English lyricism. Does the dancing undercut those qualities, or just move randomly past them? McGregor doesn't want easy answers, but are his steps ambiguous or lightweight? Live Fire Exercise certainly has a philosophical framework; it's harder to be sure of its content.

Balanchine's 1978 Ballo della Regina is new to the Royal Ballet, who dance it with unabashed glee. Danced to Verdi ballet music, Ballo is a light, fluffy work of unstoppable vitality. This production was lovingly staged by Merrill Ashley, the ballet's original star. The virtuoso steps look so impossible that they become funny.

In the ballerina role, a joyful Marianela Nuñez soars into the air and springs through intricate pointework, stopping and starting and whirling on before your eye can take it all in. Sergei Polunin spins effortlessly, then throws in an off-balance swizzle just when you least expect it. Soloists scamper through, chasing each other off the stage in dances that are both bold and delicate. Royal Ballet Mixed Bill - review Royal Opera House, London

Judith Mackrell: guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 May 2011 18.08 BST

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Royal Ballet's Sarah Lamb and Eric Underwood in Live Fire Exercise. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Wayne McGregor is a choreographer who takes his ideas from notoriously unballetic sources, such as neuro-science and tech- nology. And his latest work, Live Fire Exercise , is no exception: its title referring to the controlled explosions used in military training, and its choreography inspired by the physical reactions of soldiers as they deal with shocks and blasts.

LFE is not a ballet about war, but it is one that's shaped profoundly by violence. At the back of the stage, a screen shows John Gerrard's digitalised images of a desert ravaged by army manoeuvres. The work kicks off with footage of a massive explosion, a dense cylinder of flame spreading over the screen. No sound issues from the explosion, yet its effects ricochet through the ballet in a continual dynamic of trauma, damage and loss.

In some ways, McGregor's choreography is the most classical he has ever created, but it is classicism under duress: pirouettes and attitudes are wrenched off balance; legs shoot out with deadly force. Throughout this emotional and physical trauma, the six dancers – all of them astonishing – strive to maintain balance. If McGregor's choreography is a metaphor for violence and injury, it is also about the heroic human impulse to survive.

The ballet isn't always easy to assimilate, especially in those passages where McGregor choreographs against, rather than with, his music - Tippet's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. But some of the material is heart-wrenching. As a wracked, solitary Lauren Cuthbertson seeks consolation with each of the three men in the cast, the placing of her duets alongside the most lyrical section of Tippet's score makes her anguish all the more piercing.

While McGregor's ballet is entirely of the 21st century, Balanchine's Ballo della Regina looks back to the 19th–century world of its Verdi score, its choreography redolent of courtly processionals. But it is also a ballet pitched to a modern scale of velocity and daring. Classical steps are sprung apart, rejigged and dispatched at flying speeds. And it's exhilarating to see the Royal – dancing Ballo for the first time – rise to the challenge. Sergei Polunin etches his choreography in air and light, and if Marianela Núñez comes close to tripping over her own recklessly fast footwork, she covers it with unflappable mischief and grandeur.

With the cleverly constructed ride of Christopher Wheeldon's DGV closing the programme, this adds up to one of the most genuinely mixed bills of the season, and certainly one of the most compelling. Wayne McGregor, Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, review A new work by its resident choreographer is a triumph for the Royal Ballet.

As a man Wayne McGregor is passionately interested in the world outside dance. This means that as a choreographer he tends to make works that are laden with different ideas and influences. Art, music, philosophy, science, current events — all are grist for his mill.

Sometimes the effect of all these influences feels undigested. But when McGregor is working at his best, they come together in a magnificently stimulating whole. In Live Fire Exercise, his new work for the Royal Ballet, that fusion happened.

The key elements of the piece are music in the form of Michael Tippett’s richly-textured Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli and a setting consisting of an art work by John Gerrard. This takes a US military training exercise in the desert and trans- mutes it into a strange, slow-moving tableau of lorries crashing, a plume of flame rising from the explosion, stones rolling across the foreground like so much tumbleweed.

Although the image is of an African desert, it makes you think of Afghanistan and Iraq. With the same blank dispassion of a film such as The Hurt Locker it creates an alien landscape in which McGregor’s six dancers, in Lucy Carter’s half-light, grapple with the choreography of conflict.

There have been other ballets about war, most notably Kenneth MacMillan’s Gloria. But they have focused on the emotion of battle, on the sadness of death and loss. McGregor is attempting something different: he wants to create images that actually suggest the ideas of combat and its aftermath. dent choreographer is a triumph for the Royal Ballet

At one point, for example, Sarah Lamb is lifted by two of the men, the shape of her body conjuring thoughts of a gun; at another Frederico Bonelli and Ricardo Cervera grapple like Graeco-Roman wrestlers. Duets become battle-grounds, but the dancers also operate as a unit, their arms swinging as if on manoeuvures, their jumps and lifts looking like a fractured trainingdrill.

There are also moments of pause: they stop in the middle of a movement, and look around, confused. They stand, stock still, like Antony Gormley’s figures in a landscape, gazing impassively at the horizon.

This sophisticated tapestry of movement is staggeringly beautiful, its pensive, slightly mournful mood engrossing. It is dance for people who like to think as well as feel, both abstract and real.

Next to it, Christopher Wheeldon’s attractive DGV, looks slightly cluttered, in part because it is lumbered with an over-emphatic Michael Nyman score. But it is full of confident patterning for the corps de ballet and wonderful duets, most notably a hypnotic encounter between Gary Avis and Melissa Hamilton which makes her seem to fly. The evening opened with the Royal Ballet premiere of George Balanchine’s swooning tribute to Verdi. Ballo Della Regina is a joyful confection, perfectly staged by its originator Merrill Ashley. Marianela Nuñez gleamed through the intricacies of the ballerina role, but it was Sergei Polunin, flying across the stage as if defying physics who stole the heart.

Earlier, Dutch National Ballet paid a brief visit to Sadler’s Wells to show off five works by their esteemed choreographer Hans Van Manen, who is 80 this year. From the neo-classical couplings of Adagio Hammerklavier (1973), to the powerful, shadowy encounters of 2009’s Concertante, the entire programme was a reminder of what a clever dance-maker Van Manen is.