Royal Opera House

****

Crystal Pite’s acclaimed short piece, Flight Pattern, was created for the Royal Ballet in 2017, before Covid and the war in Ukraine. The world has moved on since its premiere and now Pite has extended the ballet into a full-length work called Light of Passage, which further delves into the themes of displacement and loss.

Light of Passage is divided into three parts: Flight Pattern; a 10-minute section called Covenant and finally Passage. Of the three, the first and last are the most moving. Flight Pattern remains a powerful take on the humanitarian crisis and the plight of refugees.  It takes on an even deeper resonance now that we are familiar with the images of Ukrainians fleeing their bombed-out cities.

Unlike Kenneth MacMillan, whose greatest creations are his exquisite pas de deux, Pite excels when she is working with large numbers of dancers: they sway and shudder as one; their bodies lurch and rock as they move on to some unknown refuge. Her dancers achieve a sculptural beauty, even when they are depicting the horror of loss.

Covenant is the shortest of the sections and the least successful. It seeks to express the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in dance form. Children run, skip and are carried around by older dancers but they fail to convey the complex ideas set down in the UN document – an impossible task, surely, and something even Pite cannot pull off.

She has more success with the final piece. Passage begins with two older dancers – Isidora Barbara Joseph and Christopher Havell – who are guest artists from the Company of Elders. They move slowly together on a bare stage, bringing emotion to every gesture. How brave of these artists to appear with Royal Ballet dancers, for they are over 60 and I am sure they will not mind me saying that their bodies are not the physically perfect specimens we are used to seeing in dancers on the Opera House stage. But that is the point of the piece: it is about final farewells, the ultimate goodbye and moving on to a new place.

Jay Gower Taylor has designed an impressive set, which enhances the mood but does not intrude and special praise must go to Francesca Chiejina, the magnificent soprano who adds her own particular magic to Henryk Gorecki’s sorrowful third symphony.

Light of Passage is at the Royal Opera House until 3 November