The Dante Project ballet. Original music by Thomas Adès. Book and choreography by Wayne McGregor. Stars Edward Watson (Dante); Gary Avis (Virgil), and Sarah Lamb (Beatrice) supported by many dancers of the Royal Ballet. Stage and costume designs by Tacita Dean; lighting by Lucy Carter and Simon Bennison; staging and assistant choreography by Amanda Eyles, Jenny Tattersall, and Mikaela Polley. Koen Kessels conducts the London Symphony Orchestra (Sergey Levitin concertmaster), Simon Halsey conducts the London Symphony Chorus. Directed for TV by Ross MacGibbon. Released 2023, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: C-
Every great ballet starts with great music. The music here was composed by Thomas Adès specifically for this production. It is all appropriate for the action taking place on the stage. But it is uniformly acerbic and dissonant with lots of percussion, brass, and noise. If you are a fan of Adès or of this style of music, you will be pleased. I don’t like his style. An hour and 45 minutes of Adès is a strain for me no matter how good the dancing is.
The best thing about this show is a remarkable chalk drawing from Tacita Dean used as set art for Act 1, The Inferno: Pilgrim. The first screenshot below features this huge work that stretches across the stage and appears to be about 30’ tall. This art changes it’s appearance in mysterious ways depending on the lighting. There is an oval-looking mirror hanging from the fly somehow which adds to the feeling of dislocation created by the chalk art. Tacita presents Hell not as a place of fire and iron, but as the ancients imagined it—a dark place of endless grief and frustration of souls bereft of bodies. The gloom works OK live, but it was doubtless a source of frustration for TV director Ross MacGibbon. In my home theater with a great LG OLED display, the images were OK. With lesser gear, this might be frustrating to watch:
Next below is Edward Watson as Dante and Fumi Kaneko as Satan on the frozen lake at the bottom of Hell. The change of lighting makes the artwork here look more like ice than stone. Watson is dressed throughout in ugly, shabby costumes. The corp dancers in Hell all wear white leotards smeared in what looks like coal dust:
In a bonus extra, the creative team posits that the massive, 3-book-long Divine Comedy can’t be portrayed in narrative fashion. But in fact, most fine-arts lovers do know quite a bit about Dante’s stories in the Inferno. I was able to recognize the identity of characters fairly well in Act 1. For example, the couple below are Francesca Hayward and Matthew Ball as the famous doomed lovers Francesca and Poalo:
Next below are the Seven Poets dancing the Pavan of the Souls in Limbo:
And here is another view of the Poets. Dante is in green and Virgil (Gary Avis) is in yellow showing Dante around:
And we all know Ulysses, here portrayed by Calvin Richardson. He is the only solo dancer in this show to get audience applause:
The blond below is Dido suffering in the Forest of the Suicides. In the background you may be able to make out a few of 16 other suicides who appear in this segment:
The only corps dance that got audience applause was the high-spirited Dance of the Thieves late in Act 1. Watson was directed throughout the visit in Hell to project his trademarked aura of a man in his final agony (or at least in urgent need of a root canal). This puzzled me since Dante was merely a sightseer in Hell with nothing personally to worry about. All told, I was not wild about this Inferno, but it was a reasonable attempt to create a narrative ballet representative of Dante’s long Book 1 of The Divine Comedy. I give Act 1 a grade of B.
Act 1 was well received by a test audience. So the next task was to work up the remaining 2 books, Purgatory and Paradise, in dance form. Well, these later books are far more abstract than the Inferno (full of true crime stories). Eventually, this abstract aspect caused the whole project to slide into disaster.
Next below is the second next best thing about this title: more artwork by Tacita Dean with a beautiful tree in a modern, urban setting. The tree is the backdrop for Act 2 called Purgatorio: Love. The identity of the men lined up with Dante remains a complete mystery to me. Dante now sports a two-tone trashy costume:
One guesses that some of the dancers in Act II represent Dante at younger stages in his life. Below we see Marco Masciari in red as, I think, young Dante. Compared to Masciari, Watson does suddenly look old. You can see why dancers have to retire about age 40. Their beauty and flexibility burns up fast. In the screenshot below one wonders if Watson has that look of agony on his face because he is actually in pain:
Next we see Dante with Sarah Lamb as Beatrice. Beatrice was Dante’s idol and the secret object of his love. Here Dante gets to dance with his sweetheart, and he’s still in agony. One wonders if Watson was ever able to project the image of a man in love:
In addition to being incomprehensible, Act 2 is really short. It smacks of something created fast under urgent time pressure. My grade for Act 2 is D.
Now we come to Act 3, Paradiso: Poema Sacro. Woe to any visual artist who tries to portray Heaven. But if you can’t do better than the 3 images below, you better cancel the project. The video on the screen looks to me to something that would have been considered obsolete 10 years ago. And consider the gastly lighting of sick browns, stale greens, and creepy purple. I think McGregor used to brag that he never repeated himself. Well the image immediately below (Act 3) sure looks to me much like as the image immediately above (Act 2):
And how creative is it to dress your corps in heaven with shiny white rubber leotards? And is heaven an exclusive club of 6 lucky souls?
I give Act 3 an F. But before giving a grade for the whole project, I should mention another thing: the keepcase booklet provided by Opus Arte is one of the worst ever. For starters, there is no listing of video chapters by numbers. The booklet has a title “Synopsis” on page 3, but there is no synopsis. There’s only a list of what I call segments and the dancers in each. The list of segments in the book does not match the chapter numbers on the disc. For example, the 5th segment in the booklet is Francesca and Paolo. But this is Chapter 6 on the disc.
Kevin O’Hare CBE wastes a whole page of the booklet with a dumb picture of himself and some egregiously stupid public relations blather. Dramaturg Uzma Hameed wastes 3 pages on abstruse sudo-intellectual clap-trap that might be OK for a scholarly journal somewhere but which does little to help us follow the dancing.
Because I’m giving this a bad grade, I did not want to invest time in measuring the pace of MacGibbon’s video file. But I did spot check. I think MacGibbon is giving us longer video segments than he did in the past. I don’t think this title is infected with DVDitis. Thank you Ross.
Blending my grades and comments above, I give this title a C-. That’s about the worst grade you can get on this website since D means “don’t buy this unless you know what you are doing” and I reserve the F mostly for student-quality work.
Next below are some trailers:
OR
