Carlos Acosta Premieres at ENO London Coliseum

Amidst the spectacle, the digital art and the choir Carlos Acosta, ballet superstar, reveals a deeply personal, emotive performance.

Entering the Coliseum’s auditorium after struggling through the hideous humidity of a late-July Saturday night in a congested and transport-crippled London is such a relief, I make the sound that is at the heart of all the endeavours of Carlos Acosta’s collaborator, Simon Elliott: ahh...

The aircon is turned up full whack and in front of me, occupying the widest proscenium arch in town, is the mouth-watering sight of a rain-spattered window pane. The amplified noise of the beating of that rain feels like a home-coming. “I suppose that’s to create a mood,” comments a lady behind me, visiting from Birmingham. “Well they need a drop down here,” replies her husband. We certainly do.

But as the theatre fills up, as the audience trickles down the aisles in ones and twos, stands and sits and fidgets and turns, I realise that Elliott’s ‘Weeping Curtains’, the overture to Carlos Acosta Premieres, is, in fact, a kind of mirror. As the chatter builds, so the volume of rain beating increases. Mingled in with the five-minute bell are rolls of thunder; the droplets on the screen increase and the audience clumps together. This is a storm, and we are at the heart of it.

This theatre was built at the height of live entertainment – its ‘widest proscenium in London’ originally the setting for musicals and popular entertainment – before such concepts as audience participation and theatre-in-the-round were promoted.

So how do Simon Elliott and his Ahh... team pursue their central tenets of inclusion and audience involvement in such a traditional environment? The opening pieces provide the answer: with digital art. On the screen the rain turns into puddles and we are outside a pub; behind the screen the real-life Acosta trudges through crowds in a high-vis jacket. Then we are in a kitchen – fridge and washing machine sketched out in dayglo green. But there are faces sputtering at the windows, there is a fractiousness about these domestic scenes. And then, with a whirlpool of green light, a vacuum centred on Acosta, we are sucked into a very personal story.

In fact we are presented with the stories of two individuals – Acosta’s opposite, Royal Ballet Principal Zenaida Yanowsky, deservedly has as much stage time as he does. The digital content guides us towards one or the other – and then, during ‘Falling Deep Inside’ we see them together – not on stage but on film. The vast screen is filled with slow-motion and reverse-motion images of their bodies – interacting, playing, fighting, fucking; in ecstasy, in pain. The camera is so close, the screen so large, we would only have such intimate views of these bodies if we were fucking or fighting them ourselves. The proximity is uncomfortable, traumatic and awkward. So when the screen lifts and the pas-de-deux between the live Acosta and Yanowsky plays out, it is something of a reprieve. But only something of one. Already bruised by our close encounter with the tense relationship, the repeated dissonances of a solo violin and the reiteration of the same crippled, intentionally inelegant movements make the dance no easy experience.

However, being a well-behaved, well-trained West End audience, we sit tight, sit quiet, and observe – no Rite of Spring riot here. But, as a friend of the Brummies behind me comments during the interval, “I wonder what most of the people in here think of this?” He does not articulate his own response – simply recognises that this is a communal experience. An experience underlined by the presence of two lines of shadowy figures at the back of the stage: ever silent, ever watchful, immobile – just like us, in fact. We could easily be them – they could be us. Conceptual theatre-in-the-round, I guess.

The relationship on the stage eventually becomes irretrievable. So broken and tortured are the couple, so exhausted and spent, she collapses in a heap and he sits with his head in his hands – the familiar outcome of years of domestic strife.

It is now that the static figures begin to move forward. A rear spotlight points at us: dazzling, turning the figures into sinister silhouettes. And the recorded choir Acosta and Yanowsky have danced to begins to mingle with the sounds of live voices – the voices of the figures who are approaching us. The message appears to be that we are all in this together, we are a community. The dancers are absorbed into the crowd and as the Pegasus Choir – for it has been them at the back of the stage all this time – retreat once more. The dancers disappear with them, their dancing now a simple walk; the basic movements we all make every day.
And again, as I put my hands together, I make that sound: ahh... – recognition, understanding. I have engaged, I have seen a bit of myself played out on stage – in a way that traditional, distancing performance would not allow. Even in this arena – all furbelows, gold leaf and red velvet – Ahh... and Acosta have enabled a level of inclusion, a sense of familiarity, an empathic response.

“I thought those people behind weren’t dancers,” says Mrs Brum, “you could see by their bodies.”
And neither are we – and neither is Carlos Acosta, most of the time.

Carlos Acosta Premieres at the London Coliseum, St Martin's Lane, London, WC 2N 4ES until 7th August, Visit here for more details