English National Ballet’s Body & Soul is a game of two halves

The toughest thing for an aspiring choreographer is being given time to find a style and develop new work. So many rising talents have seen their hopes dashed in the exposing space of a big ballet stage.

At one level, Kameron N Saunders is experienced at his craft. He was a featured backing dancer for Taylor Swift, has worked with Chappell Roan and won a competition to create a work for Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet. But Proper Conduct, premiered by English National Ballet (ENB), feels like a step too far. It flickers with interest but can’t sustain its ambition.

Divided into three parts, bound together by a gesturing, contorting narrator (Jose María Lorca Menchón), it opens with ENB’s excellent dancers circling the stage in playful jumps and turns, like characters in an MGM musical, a utopian community that is doomed to break down. “Now wasn’t that lovely. Warm, fuzzy, perfect,” the narrator announces.

But his intention – and that of Saunders – is a desire to explore “the rot” beneath. So, in the second section, the dancers peel off their top layers in gloomy light (by Kimie Nakano) and writhe around. Then, in the final part, they appear in heavy white hazmat suits, with green lights flashing behind their visors, like an army of automatons.

What all this means is hard to decipher. The uniformity of the final act might signify keeping society safe or big tech robbing people of their identity; the erotic grappling of the second might be an expression of self or a sign of corruption. Given that this is a work by an early career choreographer, some latitude is required, but it feels an odd mess, a waste of exceptional, ballet-trained dancers.

Its weaknesses are highlighted by the fact that the first section of the programme comes courtesy of the masterful Crystal Pite, who has had years to hone a style that is distinctively her own. Body and Soul (Part 1) is the first act of a full-length ballet that she created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2019.

It isolates the dancers in Tim Visser’s great pools of white light as they respond to a text (in French, translated on the cast sheet) that sets them basic tasks to follow.

“The hands move incessantly; touching chin, forehead, chest (left right left right left).” Pite’s interest is in building a series of duets – sometimes with multiple dancers taking the role of “figure one” – that endow these simple words with different meanings according to the action they are matched with.

At one moment, the duo become combatants; at another, people who grieve. In a striking scene, the dancers are organised in parallel lines down the stage, one side black, one white, and mimic the actions of a wave.

Then, they surge across the space, arms raised, symbols of resistance. Constantly, there’s an underlying sense of elusive connection, little twitches and pulses that pull the dancers together and push them apart.

Working with her trusted collaborators – Owen Belton (music), Jay Gower Taylor (scenography), Nancy Bryant (costume) and Visser – Pite is a choreographer in absolute command of what she says and how she says it. She makes dance and dancers look glorious.

Photograph by Amber Hunt