Nina Simone’s life story vividly told in Ballet Black’s Nina: By Whatever Means — review

There is enough meat on the Nina Simone story for any number of biographies — at least six exist, plus her own (ghosted) memoirs. Undaunted by the scale of Simone’s achievements as pianist, singer and civil rights icon, Ballet Black’s Mthuthuzeli November has created Nina: By Whatever Means, which premiered at the Barbican Theatre last week. It was thriftily designed, vividly danced and galvanised by a soundtrack that included two of Simone’s greatest hits: “Sinnerman” and “Mood Indigo”.

The life story is told in flashback from the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival of 1976. A few tip-up seats, a door, a window and a battered pianette whisk us between piano lessons, church, dressing rooms and concert stages. Scenes change in record time although the constant wheeling (and careful braking) of the scenery is somewhat distracting — projections have their uses.

The child prodigy’s first music lessons are cleverly transposed into dance. Teacher and pupil (the charming seven-year-old Ballet Black associate Sienne Adotey) stand either side of the keyboard as little Nina’s port de bras is gently tweaked into line. Simone’s early years as an Atlantic City nightclub chanteuse are briefly but effectively sketched. There is an ugly scene between Simone and her abusive husband, powerfully played and danced by Isabela Coracy (superb throughout) and Alexander Fadayiro.

November’s determination to celebrate a unique musician and activist are entirely understandable but a rich parallel seam of drama goes unmined. There was a less appealing side to Simone’s character, and discussions about royalties once had the troubled star chasing a record company executive through a restaurant with whatever knife came to hand. November doesn’t address any of that. A two-act format might give him room to do so.

★★★☆☆

Touring to November 2, balletblack.co.uk

Seeta Patel: Rite of Spring

Sadler’s Wells, LONDON

Spring is here. Again. Seeta Patel’s 2019 Rite of Spring, now supersized to 12 dancers, had its London premiere at Sadler’s Wells on Monday. The production joins the vast canon of dance works that have wrestled with Stravinsky’s epic score but it is up there with the very best.

Choreographers can easily be overwhelmed by the composer’s fiendish polyrhythms — back in 1913 Vaslav Nijinsky ended up standing on a chair shouting counts from the wings — but Patel, trained in the classical Indian dance discipline of bharatanatyam, seems unfazed by the score’s complexities. Who knows what kind of maths must be going on in the heads of her dancers but from this side of the footlights they seem simply to be listening to the score and surrendering to it. There’s nothing remotely improvisatory about the tightly-knit lines and clusters of the foot-stamping acolytes but they surf the tides of sound as instinctively as a shoal of fish in a cross-current.

Many Rites have had to make do with canned Stravinsky but Patel has the luxury of Kirill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, who extracted maximum impact from the thunderous percussion and snarling strings.

Patel herself danced Shree, a leisurely prologue to the main event. Backed by two musicians and a Carnatic vocalist who seemed to levitate in the darkness behind her, Patel splashed in an invisible pool, miming individual water droplets as they trickled down her arms, like Isadora Duncan playing with imaginary knuckle-bones.

Such close-up magic wouldn’t translate to a large ensemble but the same precision and the same moments of stillness can be seen in Rite, as when smoky puffs of resin are blown into the air around the Chosen One’s head. At the climax the handsomely-robed chorus select their leader (the imperious Sooraj Subramaniam) and gladly surrender themselves, crawling through his legs in a mass ritual of rebirth and renewal. Terrific.

★★★★☆

To March 14, tours later this year, seetapateldance.com