Yugen, a world premiere by Wayne McGregor and The Royal Ballet to celebrate Leonard Bernstein’s centenary.

Psalms sung in Hebrew give a spiritual dimension to Wayne McGregor’s Yugen. Yugen, evokes beauty through simplicity. The music is Bernstein’s setting of six psalms, commissioned by the Dean of Chichester Cathedral in 1963 and henceforth known as the Chichester Psalms.

The set, commissioned from writer and ceramicist Edmund de Waal, consists of four tall vitrines, display cases hovering above the rear of the stage. The dancers are dressed by designer Shirin Guild in loose fitting costumes in shades of red.

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Liam Scarlett’s 2014 creation is based on W.H. Auden’s wartime poem of that name. Bernstein composed a symphony around its themes and characters.

On stage we see four crudely characterised people, three men and a woman, who drink in a New York bar, get drunk in an apartment and end up in various unsatisfactory states of mind, apart from one who experiences an apotheosis as dawn rises over Manhattan. In addition, John Macfarlane’s sets are spectacular!

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Choreograph

Liam Scarlett

Performers

Corybantic refers to ecstatic dances performed by acolytes of a Phrygian mother of the gods, Cybele. Bernstein’s inspiration was Plato’s Symposium, in which different speakers discuss the nature of love. Each of the five movements of the work, in seven sections, evolves out of the preceding one, referring to the interlocking friendships of the Athenian speakers.

Jean-Marc Puissant’s changing structures suggest elements of an Ancient Greek temple. Erdem Moralioglu’s costumes make the men look almost nude, like Greek statues of naked young men; the women wear 1950s style corsetry, with long pleated tulle skirts that they discard half way through.

Credits

Performers