Light of Passage review: Crystal Pite’s new work is haunting and powerful

★★★★☆

Choreographer Crystal Pite can make dancers move like a murmuration of starlings, motion pulsing and rippling through a group of bodies. In Light of Passage, her new work for The Royal Ballet, those big blocks of movement evoke a community or a whole human society, from cradle to grave.

One of the world’s most in-demand choreographers, the Canadian Pite is known both for her sharp works with speech and for her gift with massed movement. In both, she has a political edge, a concern for how people treat each other.

Light of Passage expands Flight Pattern, which Pite created for this company in 2017. A response to the refugee crisis, the earlier work used the first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Now she stages the whole symphony, adding two new works.

Flight Pattern sets the tone for the evening-length work, and remains the most intense. Dancers rock and flow together, making a perilous journey. Movement goes from naturalistic to stylised and back again, as a coat is cradled like a child or heaped into someone else’s arms. Kristen McNally and Marcelino Sambé are haunting in solo roles.

For the two new works, Jay Gower Taylor’s set, lit by Tom Visser, conjures up smoke and reflections. Patterns hang in the air, like a blown glass sculpture looming over the dancers’ heads. As the mood shifts, the reflections flare into apocalyptic red or glowing white and gold.

Covenant, the shortest of these works, was inspired by UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It starts with a child dancer running on the spot, before a flood of adults sweep in behind him. Pite treats her cast of six children as embodiments of innocence. It can look self-conscious – yet that’s swept away as her adult dancers surround and support the children, a dark mass like a swell of water. They’re like a tide, lifting them high into the air.

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Passage starts with two older dancers Christopher Havell and Isidora Barbara Joseph, both members of the Company of Elders. This time, the corps de ballet around them is idealised, dressed in cream and moving through smooth, elegant lines.

But it’s not all plain sailing. Joseph fights her way back through the serene throng, reaching Havell before they are separated again. It adds a push and tension to Pite’s undulating lines. In a series of four duets, couples reach for calm, but it’s the moments of strain that stand out: a woman embracing a man who vanishes from her grasp, a shiver of tension or loneliness. The whole company dance with whole-hearted conviction, diving into Pite’s fluid and churning moves.

Until 3 November. www.roh.org.uk