THE ROYAL BALLET.

LAUGHTER LIFTS GRAVITY IN LONDON THE ROYAL BALLET ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN LONDON, ENGLAND MARCH 10, 2001

It looked to be a somber evening when the Royal Opera House's regally embossed curtains were drawn to reveal the lone figure of Sir Anthony Dowell center stage. With wavering voice, he announced the death of Dame Ninette de Valois, the Royal Ballet's 102-year-old founder, and invited the audience to join in a minute of silent remembrance. Then the very sparse house--the British don't like triple bills, especially if there is something new--witnessed the evening's first and equally doleful work, about the anguished breakdown of an intense sibling relationship. Then came the new work, which fanned the flames on a series of ready-to-ignite convoluted couplings. It was only at the end of the evening, in the last piece, that the audience was allowed to cheer up and have a good laugh. Madame would have approved.

Kenneth MacMillan created Triad in 1972; its complex choreography and searing emotions were first danced by Dowell, Wayne Eagling, and Antoinette Sibley. (American Ballet Theatre presented it at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1984 with Robert La Fosse, Johan Renvall, and Amanda McKerrow.) The Royal hasn't seen this work for twenty-seven years; the revival has new costumes, designed by MacMillan's widow, Lady Deborah, who changed the veined unitards (which suggested the brothers' blood-ties) to a more contemporary look--cut-off shorts for the Brother and calf-hugging tights for the Boy. Triad delves into the hidden psychological depths of two close brothers, who are wrenched apart emotionally and physically by the arrival of a young girl. Despite the dark scenario, which explores childhood remembrances and games with an undercurrent of burgeoning sexuality, MacMillan's choreography fluidly links each episode in a ribbon of imaginative movement, unraveling the brothers' tight bonding with unusual and complicated twists and turns.

Swedish dancer Johan Persson, whom the Royal Ballet recently recruited from the National Ballet of Canada, filled the Dowell role. A strong, muscular dancer and good partner, he handled the formidable high lifts and controlled technique well. But the role needs more than technique, and Persson, debuting in the role, has yet to plumb its emotional depths--he was not helped by his omnipresent Colgate smile, which rivals those of Bush and Blair. Hubert Essakow as the younger sibling was the better actor, clearly demonstrating in his crisp, light footwork and firecracker dancing the realization of potential loss. Jaimie Tapper, also a former National Ballet of Canada dancer, was the Girl; she displayed her lovely long legs in pulled-up stretches, long balances, and far-reaching jetes. (Too bad her pointe shoes tapped so loudly as she scudded across the floor.)

Ashley Page is an annual contributor to The Royal Ballet repertoire, but sadly, not an audience favorite--it was embarrassing to see so many empty seats. His latest work, This House Will Burn, smolders visually, but unfortunately does not ignite. The set frontispiece shows Stephen Chambers's painting of a punk-haired shadow figure of a man falling backward, while the brightly lit set is nearly bare--just a sink and a double bed with a brilliant red cover over a turquoise sheet. A glass-fronted room on a higher level lets the audience peer voyeuristically at the sleazy goings-on. Two ten-foot piles of junk, furniture, and paper on either side of the stage look ready, one wrongly assumes, to be torched. Jon Morrell co-designed this set with Chambers; Orlando Gough contributed a jazzy but repetitive score. Page demands little interaction from his dancers as a whole. Rather, he bases his choreography on multiple short nonstop duets that needed more than one pair of eyes to follow. Couples sped onstage to cavort in contemporary jargon or to wrestle with each other in relationships, not of the gentle, passionate kind, but of the more brutal twenty-first-century approach.

Page did, however, select the cream of The Royal Ballet's young dancers--Alina Cojocaru, Zenaida Yanowsky, Inaki Urlezaga, Mara Galeazzi, Laura Morera, Ricardo Cervera, Edward Watson, and Joshua Tuifua--who attacked his divergent choreography with determined relish. Dressed in a motley selection of student garb and sporting spiky, knobby hair styles, they stabbed, sliced, soared, and spun, some on pointe, others in jazz shoes. Orchestrating the action was a menacingly omnipresent man whose black suit lit up brilliantly like a Christmas tree in the final moments. This role was danced by the wonderful Johan Kobborg, who showed the fleetest of footwork and high, snap-open jetes a la seconde, all done with grace and panache, at great speed.

So it was amazing to see him twenty minutes later, bushy-browed, hunched, and bandy-legged in wrinkly white long-johns, chewing on a cigar like Groucho Marx, playing outrageously to the audience and wickedly prowling after Sarah Wildor, whose own flightiness was delightful. Jerome Robbins's The Concert put the needed smiles back on faces in an evening that had started with such gravity.