Coliseum, London
George Balanchine never concealed his fascination for ballerinas. "Ballet is woman," the choreographer famously pronounced. But this week in London, it's the male dancers who have dominated the stage. At the Royal Ballet, Steven McRae and Sergei Polunin have been challenging critics to coin superlatives for their performances in Ashton's Rhapsody. Meanwhile, over at English National Ballet, Vadim Muntagirov has emerged as that company's indisputable star.
Viewers of BBC4's Agony and Ecstasy, following ENB for a year, may expect Muntagirov to be the pale and peaky boy portrayed on TV. But a few months can change everything. Dancing Siegfried in Swan Lake (Derek Deane's theatre production, not the arena version shown on TV), Muntagirov shows how magnificently he's grown into his talent.
We can take for granted, now, his floating line, his tightly finished jumps and his elegantly finessed partnering. What's new – and mesmerising – is the range of his musicality and acting. Muntagirov doesn't just show us a callow Prince yearning for romance: his entire body seems possessed by the seductive, intoxicating melancholy of Tchaikovsky's score. When he finds his ideal love in Daria Klimentová's Odette, he adds a sweetly touching register of protectiveness – awed by Odette's fragility, he wants to protect as much as possess her.
As for Klimentová, she has blossomed in this partnership. Even if her dancing falls short of grandeur, she uses her delicate build to evoke a rare sense of vulnerability: a quicksilver shiver of pirouettes, a tremulous fluttering foot. And she is a deliciously ruthless Odile; the contempt with which she parodies Odette's delicately anguished style is almost laugh-out-loud funny. But final praise for this production must go to ENB's corps: refined, expressive and coherent, they are the poetic heart of Swan Lake.