Page 236 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Dance Re-Imagined CREDIT: Mark Allan

Dance Re-Imagined, Royal Festival Hall ★★★☆☆

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s wild and whacky ballet score Harnasie, which had a
long gestation between 1923 and 1931, has never found favour as a concert piece: in contrast to his
sumptuous song cycles, this is a Polish Rite of Spring, by turns barbaric and pungent, which is
striking in its sonorities but fails to cohere. It certainly benefits from visual distraction and Wayne
McGregor and Ben Cullen Williams’s experimental multimedia reimagining, presented at the
Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, provided plenty of that.

The original story revolves around a girl from the Tatra mountains about to be unhappily married
who is abducted by a bandit, its ending unresolved with the wistful soloist asking: “Are you glad to
see me or someone else?” In this interpretation, though, McGregor and Ben Cullen Williams have
taken the composer’s words that the ballet scenario should be thought of only as a general guide to
the folk-based inspiration of the piece: this new work is called A Body for Harnasie.

The score was performed with scrupulous clarity and brilliant textures by the LPO under Edward
Gardner, with solo tenor Robert Murray forever in the shadows, and a small but magnificent
Flemish Radio Choir. As they played, in the middle of the Festival Hall stage, a huge metal
structure designed by Ben Cullen Williams like an Instagram screen that bent, folded, twisted and
turned was used for projections of drone shots of the Tatra mountains, abstract designs, and film
of McGregor’s characteristic writhing bodies, two males and a female echoing the scenario. The
movements had been generated through improvisation and refined by AI, “to create a
choreographic instrument that invites a new kind of sculptural dance between artist and orchestra,
motion and AI”, but while there were moments of eloquence it was not obvious to see the relevance
of Cullen Williams’s moving structure to this ambitious aim.

The technical demands of this structure must make it extremely tricky (not to say expensive) to
export, yet at a time when all concert organisations are looking for new ways to animate their
events, this approach certainly provides a potential new way forward: the combination of film,
dance, and AI-generated combination with music must be transferable to other concert scores in
other, perhaps simpler, circumstances.