Cunningham comes to mind, too, because of the work’s detached interaction of movement, music and set. The intense color and ascetic impersonality of Herrera’s design, Carter’s lighting and the mysterious, splintering lines and tectonic shifts of Thorvaldsdottir’s music play equal roles with the dance in “Untitled.” You could look at it as a soundscape with movement, a landscape with sound, a kind of installation of bodies, light, music and visual geometries.
Perhaps that’s why, despite the austere beauties of the movement, it was hard to focus on the dance itself, or feel the piece as a coherent whole. The vertiginously intense focus of Herrera’s work invites the viewer in, balancing formalism with an invitation to find meaning and emotion, but “Untitled” doesn’t quite get there.
At least not yet, or not for me on Friday. Pieces can find their form as choreographers adjust, dancers absorb the movement in their bodies, and viewers’ eyes evolve. “Untitled” feels oddly diffuse; perhaps that will change over time.
Wheeldon’s “Corybantic Games,” set to Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade After Plato: Symposium,” with Greek-inspired costumes by Erdem Moralioglu, is a reminder of this choreographer’s craft, wit and range. Wheeldon is less interested in pushing the extremes of ballet technique than McGregor, but the piece offers an inventive, playful range of movement (stylized profiles, shoulder stands, flexed feet), fleeting folk dance and ballet references (“Serenade” in its interlinked lines, “Les Sylphides” in its groupings) and invigoratingly seamless stitching of the five movements of Bernstein’s violin concerto.
In MacMillan’s “Anastasia Act III,” to Bohuslav Martinu’s “Symphony No. 6,” Laura Morera, a principal dancer who retires next month, offered a harrowing portrayal of Anna Anderson, the incarcerated woman who believes herself to be the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia. That was about it for this ballet. Not all artworks improve with time.
Untitled, 2023/Corybantic Games/Anastasia Act III
Through June 17 at the Royal Opera House, London, roh.org