The Royal Ballet review, Royal Opera House: The company returns with a wave of love

The Royal Ballet returns to the stage with world and company premieres, a commitment to the future – and with a wave of love. The socially distanced audience offer up a standing ovation as the lights go down. The dancers respond with burnished performances, joyful and committed.

Next year, the in-demand American choreographer Kyle Abraham will create a new work for the company. In the meantime, he made this short trio while getting to know the dancers. Optional Family: A divertissement starts with letters of sniping resentment between a long-married couple. The voiceover gets a laugh, but sets limits on the dance that follows: these relationships seem richer, more ambiguous than the joke.

Natalia Osipova and Marcelino Sambé are fiercely glamorous. Stanisław Węgrzyn might be one of the letter’s “three ungrateful children”, but his silky moves suggest a figure of temptation, of what lies beyond. The dancing is explosive and unpredictable, Abraham responding to ballet technique but drawing on his own eclectic contemporary style. Osipova whirls away from Sambé, arms coiling with seething energy, her speed against his velvet flow of movement.

Danced to recorded dialogue, Crystal Pite’s The Statement is a terrifying political comedy of gaps and euphemisms, threats that are only just not stated. The dancers’ bodies twist and spike to the speech rhythms, their fears seeping out around the points the characters try to make. Royal Ballet dancers tend to be natural, naturalistic actors, which occasionally softens Pite’s ironic bite – but they pour themselves into the layered, fractured imagery of this superb work.

Solo Echo, a second Pite work, is an evocation of winter to Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. Jay Gower Taylor’s scenic design surrounds the work with images of falling snow. The eight dancers stand alone or gather into clumps. They take long strides, as if moving through deep drifts, or journeying through memories.

Pite’s groupings are muscular, movement rippling through the lines of bodies. A group hold Sambé, reaching for him as he falls away. The mood is both emotional and poised, deep feeling seen from a distance.

Soloists shine in a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s glossy Within the Golden Hour. Francesca Hayward dances with radiant expansiveness. Even the space between Yasmine Naghdi and Ryoichi Hirano seems charged: when she glides away, you can almost see a glowing thread of connection between them.