She has cobbled together a group piece she created in 1973 with the inclusion of a couple of today’s dancers.
Mind you, including Sarah Lamb and Steven McRae in anything ensures serial curtain calls – is there a clue there?
The title The Illustrated ‘Farewell’ refers to Haydn’s 45th Symphony – get it?
Lamb and McRae dash in and out of the nearly 40-year-old previous concoction while we scratch our heads and wonder why.
A black stage, greyish costumes and dim lighting all add to the creative gloom.
You can’t help thinking “my taxes pay for this!”
Then along comes Arthur Pita’s The Wind and puts the whole evening back into perspective.
This is a straightforward send-up of every Clint Eastwood Western you have seen.
Jeremy Herbert is listed as set and wind machine designer and as the curtain rises all is explained.
A vast sheet of plastic billows across the stage with lethal ferocity.
Glimpses of endless desert and an almost bare setting are viciously exposed along with a white-clad ghost (Edward Watson) revelling in the horror to come.
Things settle down as a couple of men pump a railway trolley carrying a pretty little thing in frilly pink into the action.
Then as she removes her straw hat, revealing Natalia Osipova, you know things are not what they seem.
Based, appropriately, on a 1925 Dorothy Scarborough novel, the hot and silent desert boosts a tensely sexed male atmosphere to produce a melodramatic and highly emotional flare up.
Happily the dancers seem as glad as we do to get down to the nitty gritty business of love, sex and betrayal.
Wait a minute, though… doesn’t Swan Lake feature all that stuff?
The cast appears to have a whale of a time proving there’s more to being on the stage than a beautiful arabesque.
A welcome addition to the Royal Ballet repertoire is Hofesh Shechter’s Untouchable, a masterpiece of how to focus attention on a stage with 20 dancers and no soloists and still tell a terrible story of war, death and thigh-high mud.
Moving, thrilling and horrific, Untouchable is an outstanding piece of art by Shechter, made disturbingly real by the Royal Ballet dancers.