Royal Ballet of Flanders, Impressing the Czar, 2007. Photo Johan Persson.
that ballet is more than simply movements carried out as perfectly as possible. Bennetts wants to bring out the dancers' personality. Not surprisingly, given that she was Forsythe's ballet mistress for fifteen years. In late 2009 the programme included another work choreographed by Forsythe that has drastically affected the language of contemporary dance. In
Artifact (1984) we see Forsythe doing his own thing by switching around and greatly varying the execution of ballet techniques such as the
tendu - the leg that sways away from the body with the toes pointing to the floor - or the
rond de jambe - a circular movement with the leg extended.
The New York Times and other foreign papers were searching for superlatives to describe the performance of just one of Forsythe's masterpieces. And the Royal Ballet walked away with a nomination for the British Dance Critics Circle National Dance Award.
Up until now the dancers of the Royal Ballet have been known mainly for their virtuosity. They owe this reputation to the company's proud tradition. The Royal Ballet was founded in 1969 by the mother of dance in Flanders, Jeanne Brabants. She was succeeded, briefly, by the extremely conservative Rus Valery Panov, followed in turn by Robert Denvers, who had once danced with Maurice Béjart and managed to attract stars like Nureyev and Baryshnikov to his New York dance school. Denvers introduced daily classes. And he had corne up with a plan to perform works by Balanchine and Kylian with the Antwerp Royal Ballet, but was compelled by circumstances to accede to the sometimes conservative-minded regular ballet-going publics demand for the classical ballets. Without introducing any too blatant changes in style, Kathryn Bennetts swept away that pattern of expectation. She added elements that make ballet into a contemporary dance form: Personal experience of the movements, risk-taking, involvement. From the moment she arrived she threw the company's doors and windows wide open in various ways. All the dancers, including the soloists, had to prove themselves again. A few left and a few new, mainly foreign, faces appeared, but the greater part of the company remained. And Bennetts is building bridges with contemporary dance: in spring 2011 the Royal Ballet will perform a production by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, just one of the new stars in the Flemish dance firmament, who among other achievements has already delighted the foreign press and the public with his productions at the Avignon Theatre Festival.
