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I never clearly understood what motivated Kenneth MacMillan to create a stage celebration of the divine mother of modern dance, but what I remember clearly is that his 1981 work, the première of which I attended, was not one of his best. Twenty-eight years later, Deborah MacMillan, following the suggestion of Royal Ballet’s artistic director Monica Mason, has reworked Isadora in line with her late husband’s aesthetics. Alas, the new multimedia one-act production is no better than the old three-acter. Here, the interaction between filmed images and danced ones provides the historical background needed to appreciate the famous artist and her context. Yet the overabundance of film clips — some of which are also historically inaccurate — turns the whole thing into a pedantic TV-like documentary. Moreover, some atypically naïve choreography, which, against MacMillan’s distinctive traits, never delves deeply into the psychological depths of the characters or of given events, adds greatly to the indigestible ‘docu-ballet’ feeling. At times, the movement vocabulary is so frequently unimpressive and literal that the ‘docu-ballet’ turns frequently into an even more disappointing ‘docu-pantomime’ — and I am not referring to the traditional Christmas genre here, but to mere silent acting.
Dramaturgically, the new work is also very weak. In an informative programme note on the genesis of the old work, author Gillian Freeman states that the original intention was not to follow the chronology of Duncan’s life. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the new work does, although the passionately turbulent love episode with the poet Esenin has been removed. The focus is on the tragic series of events that underscored Isadora’s life, punctuated by a voiceover by Nichola McAuliffe, quoting salient passages from the artist’s memoirs. It is a pity that, with just one or two exceptions, the more humorous passages from Isadora’s writings are totally overlooked — and the few remaining ones add little chiaroscuro to the gloomy pantomime.
Such a choreographically uneven and dramaturgically limp context offers little or nothing to its interpreters. The night I went, Isabel McKeegan did everything she could to bring Isadora to life, and she did so in a splendid way, negotiating the little evocative choreography and the unbearably long stretches of silent acting. Around her gravitated good artists such as Edward Watson — a dead ringer for Edward Gordon Craig — Christopher Saunders, Vanessa Palmer and Johannes Stepanek; deprived of any in-depth characterisation they, too, looked trapped in the morass of a theatrical hybrid I would be very happy to forget anything about.
Luckily, the evening concluded with a sparkling execution of Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, in which artists such as Lauren Cuthbertson, Yuhui Choe, Laura Morera, Leanne Benjamin, Samantha Rayne, Johan Kobborg, José Martín, Edward Watson, Sergei Polunin and Johannes Stepanek compensated fully for the evening’s initial dreariness.
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