Wayne McGregor’s UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey — superb dancing and fantastical imagery

Jim Henson’s 1982 eco-myth movie The Dark Crystal is something of a cult and the 12-year-old Wayne McGregor was an early convert. Now, 41 years later, he has unveiled a dance version of the story which premiered at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre on Saturday: 80 minutes of doomy, fantastical imagery interlaced with high-tensile movement.

Henson’s original tale of plucky “gelflings” restoring the magic crystal is sidelined in favour of “the ecological, social and psychological themes of the film”. This spares any elfophobes among us from the nuts and bolts of the quest but does make what remains of the story rather hard to decode and the programme, most of it impenetrably printed grey-on-grey in what looks like six-point sans serif, is no help. McGregor is inspired by stories but has no interest in spoon-feeding his audience a scenario — narratives are a launch pad, not a template. Dramaturgy for UniVerse — as with Woolf Works and The Dante Project — was farmed out to Uzma Hameed but she too favours an elliptical approach. The result is a succession of apocalyptic episodes only resolved in the final, Eden-like apotheosis.

The production was made in collaboration with the Jim Henson Company and features stunning projections by Ravi Deepres and fantastical costumes and masks by Philip Delamore and Alex Box. Deepres’s kaleidoscopic collage of climate catastrophe takes us on a nightmare journey through a planet in crisis: the Piper Alpha oil rig blazes; an oil spill engulfs a seabird; entire forests are reduced to blackened embers.

At the dark heart of the piece, McGregor’s dancers are supersaturated with red light, enacting a frenzied tarantella in which they are both the flames and the animals whose habitat they are destroying. This forest fire set piece is the visual climax of the work but Deepres can make an impact with the simplest sequence: a single betta fish fan-dancing in a cross-current; a trio of vast suns about to collide.

Snatches of spoken text by Isaiah Hull drag Henson’s original concerns squarely into the 2020s — “What’s the agenda for this gender war for real if not retail” — but add little. The score by TV and film composer Joel Cadbury is essentially illustrative, coexisting with the dance but never quite matching or inspiring it. Delamore dresses the warring tribes of planet Thra in a range of screen-printed unitards accessorised with capes, wings, hunchbacks etc, which distinguish the Skeksis from the UrRu (do keep up) while allowing complete freedom of movement for McGregor’s nine superb dancers.

McGregor’s writing has acquired a classical polish during his 17 years as the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer and there are airy flashes of petite batterie but the old gymnastic hyperextensions still occasionally break through. The ensembles are edgy and furious although interlayered with more lyrical passages, including a fine duet for the couple tasked with saving the planet. There is a potential for sensory overload with such an elaborate staging, yet every move registers clearly in Lucy Carter’s sculptural sidelights and McGregor never allows the dancing to be overwhelmed by the dazzling visuals that surround it.

★★★★☆

To June 4, roh.org.uk