★★★★★
Any scepticism I had about watching Mozart’s Requiem turned into a dance piece was swept away within five minutes of this stunning double bill, a wonderfully ambitious intercontinental collaboration between Opera North and Phoenix Dance Theatre in Leeds, and Cape Town Opera and Jazzart Dance Theatre in South Africa. I will go further. I cannot remember ever being so moved by Mozart’s deathbed masterpiece.
Dane Hurst, the director and choreographer, says his starting point was personal grief during the Covid pandemic. That suggests a morbid approach, and indeed there are movements — his wildly angular group choreography to the Kyrie fugue and particularly a convulsive solo dance to the Lachrymosa — where you feel you are watching sufferers in their last throes. Sometimes, too, when the music falls
silent, you hear the dancers gulping for breath — another poignant evocation of that tragic period.
Elsewhere, however, Hurst conveys religious consolation, even hope, by using the solo singers (Ellie Laugharne, Ann Taylor, Mongezi Mosoaka, Simon Shibambu) and the chorus, grouped at the back of the stage or the sides, as something like guardian angels. They watch over and physically comfort the dancers in their most anguished moments, then finally beckon them to a different realm.
That may sound sentimental, but the effect is anything but. The dancers’ movements are athletic, assertive and vivid, and so is the singing and playing. The Opera North orchestra sound punchy under Garry Walker’s direction, and the chorus’s singing is full-blooded and incisive. Great news that the Requiem is being filmed for BBC4.
The double bill’s second half, After Tears, acts as a half-hour sequel. We are now in South Africa, and although the piece includes one solemn spoken incantation to ancestral spirits in the Sesotho language, the mood is celebratory: a banish-your- sorrows wake, at which the choreography becomes increasingly exuberant until the stage is a whirl of stamping feet and airborne bodies.
The choral and orchestral score, by the South African composer Neo Muyanga, is charming rather than profound, but its driving, percussion-led rhythms and catchy refrains ideally serve the combined ensembles of dancers — 16 of them, whooping as they leap, and surely harnessing enough energy to power a small national grid. “I want them for my funeral,” someone exclaimed as the curtain fell.