A dramatic powerful contemporary style of ballet roars on stage to take set at the Lyceum theatre.
A stone Egyptian set, with the use of multiple projections to highlight different rooms within the palace. We see Cleopatra centre stage performing a lovely solo piece later joined by Wadjet an Egyptian god in the form of a snake. His contemporary Mohawk hairstyle and a tight tie dye all in one captures the audiences attention immediately. A great contact improv scene takes place with soft mellow music accompanied by the orchestra.
Many costume changes occurred throughout the performance of Cleopatra many containing the males in short wrap around skirts with a sash situated central to the pelvis giving a real sense of what Egyptian men wore from around 60BC onwards. The women's costumes mainly consisted on long brightly coloured dresses some with bells on to add light sounds as they moved across the stage. This very much reminded me of costumes used within belly dancing.
The display of sibling rivalry is evident between Cleopatra and Ptolemy with a fantastic conflict contact duo scene taking place centre stage on two blocks of raised stairs. Thus, resulting in the death of Ptolemy plunged in the bath tub by his own sister. Cleopatra is most definitely not a woman to take a fight lying down!
The lighting consists much general state with warm yellow washes and pink, blue and purple washes for many of Cleopatra's sequences.
The most powerful scene that stood out for me are; the boarding of the barge to sail the river Nile. This to me was where you see a versatile static set add props to really set a scene. We see a powerful projection of waves under a large sail, following two dancers elegantly attaching a blue satin cloth stage left to right and one dancer fixing an ore centre backstage and voilà we are now embarking on a journey with Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. Nevertheless, the love making scene was cleverly done with a white sheet placed centre backstage to the front of the stage with Julius and Cleopatra both taking turns to dominate the missionary position while they roll in the sheet. The best part has yet to come as low and behold a baby is born as the white sheet is rolled in a oval ball to symbolise this. Baby Cearsarion has entered the world.
The death of Julius Caesar was slightly prolonged but brilliantly choreographed with a very powerful orchestra to compensate the long dramatic death as the senators encircle him with various slow forces of dance movements to imitate the copious amount of stabbing Julius encounters.
While the dancers were aesthetically good and could not fault any moves technically, I did at times think there was less ballet and more dance theatre displayed. This occurs much throughout Act 2 where facial expressions and playing the role overshadowed the essence of ballet.
I applaud Northern Ballet's take on Cleopatra as it is fresh, modern and vibrant and clearly moving with the times; keeping it current yet certain pieces kept traditional.
