Apollo Resurrected

United Strings of Europe and Gandini Juggling, Kings Place, London, October 2022

A milestone of 20th-century ballet, Apollo emerged from the initial collaboration between George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky, whose artistic partnership left a lasting imprint on dance. The choreographer called the ballet “the turning point of my life. In its discipline and restraint, its sustained oneness of feeling, the score was a revelation…I began to see how I could clarify, by limiting, by reducing what seemed to be multiple possibilities to the one which is inevitable.”

Nearly 50 years after that work’s premiere in 1928, the first person to dance the title role in America described his experience to me. “In Apollo,” Lew Christensen said, “there is also the demand on your body to respond with accents, full steam…You can’t ignore it; there’s no way you can do the ballet if you ignore the music…The score did seem hard at first, but after a while it’s just as easy to listen to Apollo as to listen to The Blue Danube.”

Well, maybe for him. Stravinsky’s music still baffles many people, and Balanchine’s astonishing rendering of it in movement means nothing to you if you’ve never seen the ballet. Luckily, music doesn’t occupy a glass case like a fossil; it’s always new, always open to whatever interpretation anyone wants to attach to it.

Created by United Strings of Europe and Gandini Juggling, Apollo Resurrected has nothing to do with ballet or classical mythology. Instead, with the musicians positioned behind them, four jugglers sketch a sweet tale of a downhearted man coaxed toward contentment. His three helpers—aptly, three women, an echo of the ballet’s muses—tend him like friends, guiding his body and deftly maneuvering him among their neatly overlapping limbs.

And all four juggle small or larger balls with any number of quick hands and feet, reflecting the music’s lines and rhythms with the patterns they make in space. The man’s character, described by the program at King’s Place as “an artist down on his luck, depressed, and in urgent need of inspiration,” seemed incidental to their shared alertness and balanced proficiency. Working together like a string quartet, they passed impulses from one to another, stretching silence and anticipation as the balls paused midair before succumbing to gravity or leading our eyes as a single illuminated sphere rolled dreamily along outstretched arms.

The show’s director and librettist, Bill Barclay, brushed their precise circus skills with whimsical touches of mime and a hint of narrative. But the music alone gave the movement its dynamic momentum; a friend said she would have been disappointed to encounter either one without the other.

Originally intended for an orchestra of 34 string instruments, the score sounded terrific, both lean and lush in a vibrant reading by six members of the innovative ensemble. As ever, the hall’s bright acoustics played their part, enhancing Stravinsky’s clean sonorities, and the sound, like the action, came straight off the stage without any distortion or amplification. Isn’t that one of the best reasons to attend live performances? Nothing beats immediacy.

Gandini Juggling returns to the English National Opera production of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten in March 2023. The group is also touring extensively; see gandinijuggling.com 

If you’re curious about Balanchine’s Apollo, take a look at the 1960 performance on YouTube, led by Jacques d’Amboise.