What a joy to find Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple given full run of the grandiose Palais Garnier. The sparky duo from London, known as Jess and Morgs, bring their audacious blend of choreography and live camerawork to a gripping new creation, Arena, with video design by Jakub Lech. It peaks with a bravura sequence in which Loup Marcault-Derouard leaves the stage and is seen on a huge screen, racing around the opera house’s imposing halls and staircase. Arena gives the sense of choreographers in a candy store, seizing the real estate newly available to them after their hit, tech-centric reboot of Coppélia for Scottish Ballet in 2022.
The piece opens with understated, percussive coolness and shades of A Chorus Line – an athletic squad limber up with individual and collective confidence. “Next please!” barks the voiceover and a camera operator glides down the queue, capturing beady eyes, beating chests, glistening sweat. In the age of Instagram, dancers are ever-ready for their closeups and here the port de bras frequently results in tightly framed faces – but Arena exposes the perils of chronically online culture and the urge to compete, compare and conform. There is a gladiatorial element to Annemarie Woods’ costumes yet this is a dystopian contest that also feels rooted in the present day.
Marcault-Derouard’s character is given a number not a name and, as his world unravels, he finds himself alternately torn apart in frenzied solos under a red filter (lighting by DM Wood), bewildered among the corps (with a driving score by Mikael Karlsson) or siloed (in a spinning interrogation room on Sami Fendall’s set). When caught in the flash of other dancers’ cameraphones, there is a sense that all of us are now subjected to the paparazzi’s prying eyes.
If the piece could have greater coherence and emotional punch, it fizzes with ideas and style. Despite the sinister setup, there are lovely bursts of Jerome Robbins-style pep and Arena turns the relationship between performers and camera operator (Nine Seropian) into a teasing duet. They share a far more compelling dynamic, with a better judged overall balance between the action on screen and stage, than most live-filmed performances.
Arena is paired with Étude by Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau, in an evening with the title Empreintes. It translates as “imprints” and both use the corps to probe notions of making your mark in Identikit society, with Morau pushing towards Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. Gustave Rudman’s music at first suggests an orchestra warming up but Morau, who has a gift for upsetting convention, is opening with an ending as soloist Laurène Levy takes a curtain call. With rictus grin and cyborg blankness, she clutches her bouquet and implores us to applaud. When the corps join her, they all wear the same stiff tutus and Morau finds uncanniness, not uniform beauty, in their factory-line similarity. Despite the orchestral sweep, their bourrées look desperate, the pliés creepily arachnoid. The overall effect is of scuttling not fluttering.
Morau strips the piece backs to its creation, evoking rehearsals at a barre that imprisons the dancers and letting us hear them count the music. But he also reflects on the glitziness of the end product, with Max Glaenzel’s set design making ballet’s broader iconography as uncanny as Morau’s choreography. A huge model of the auditorium’s chandelier is lowered on stage like a mother ship, bleeping, swinging and holding the gaze of the dancers to ask what keeps us in thrall to ballet’s chocolate-box splendour. Like Arena, Étude makes full use of the deep stage and acknowledges the rest of the building, too – directly suggesting that the dancers’ unsettling behaviour is our own.