The Dante Project, Royal Opera House, review: Ambitious ballet bubbles over with ideas

Heaven, hell, and everything in between: Wayne McGregor’s new work for The Royal Ballet has huge scale and ambition, with a rich new score by Thomas Ades. Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, with designs by the artist Tacita Dean, it bubbles over with ideas. Each of the three acts takes us into a new realm, with a distinctive soundworld and designs by Dean.

There’s a bold energy to Inferno, the most accessible of the three. Under Lucy Carter’s gorgeous lighting, Dean’s painted backdrop seems to morph from stylised map to blood-red Dore illustration, from ice cavern to thickly painted abstract art. The dancers’ black body tights are dusted with chalk, looking both ghostly and corporeal.

Edward Watson, in his farewell to the Royal Ballet, plays Dante, with Gary Avis as Virgil, his guide through hell. They’re powerful dance actors, but McGregor gives them little space for characterisation. The drama comes from the seething souls of the damned.

Joseph Sissens coils like a sea serpent, all spellbinding undulation. Anna Rose O’Sullivan is a driven, commanding Dido. A quartet of wrathful women pick and prance, their footwork both dainty and furious. The corps de ballet writhe, lament or explode into triumphant bravura. So does Ades, who treats Liszt as his own Virgil, weaving in quotations and a gleeful 19th-century theatricality.

For Purgatorio, we’re in a different world. The score evokes the wash of waves, with chanting voices – drawn from the Ades Synagogue in Jerusalem – and glowing fanfares. Dean’s set shows a modern street, shades of lilac suggesting a photo negative, with a huge tree lit in fresh green.

In this golden space, McGregor focuses on Dante and Beatrice. We see three versions of the characters: childhood, adulthood, and a poetic present. The Royal Ballet has storytelling in its blood, while McGregor’s instincts are more conceptual. In Purgatorio, he and dramaturge Uzma Hameed find a space in between, events layered with memory and longing.

Paradise is an anti-climax. A budget time vortex spins on an overhead film screen, while dancers in shiny body tights whirl across a black stage. It’s a flat evocation of the cosmos, a thinning of invention. And though McGregor responds to Ades’s swirling fanfares with big steps for the men, he doesn’t dig into the score. The strongest moment is a weighted duet for Watson and Sarah Lamb’s Beatrice, full of counterbalanced movement. Dante’s still earthbound, even dancing with a celestial idea.