Shirley Dent
posted 23 March 2007

Alastair Marriott's new ballet 'Children of Adam' - part of the Royal Ballet's mixed programme at the Royal Opera House, which ends tomorrow night - has been hammered by the critics.

It is based on Walt Whitman's earthy explorations of body and soul in the 'Children of Adam' and 'Calamus' poems, but Zoe Anderson in the Independent was moved to ask how we got from Whitman to 'so much sexual cringing'. The FT's Clement Crisp said he found 'the whole thing dismaying'. The Guardian's Judith Mackrell 'felt for' Marriott and his 'opportunistic mix of sources', especially since the piece was sandwiched between two Balanchine classics, 'Apollo' and 'Theme and Variations'. I love dance and I love poetry (I'm a huge Whitman fan) - I really wanted to love 'Children of Adam', but in this case the critical hammering was thoroughly deserved. So where did it all go wrong?

Marriott loses sight of the thing that really unites poetry and classical dance. In a word, form - precise, accurate attention to the little things that add up to something transcendent, universal. Instead he plumbs for a degraded notion of both poetry and dance as a sopping wet melodrama of emotion - it's the 'let-it-all-hang-out-and-feel-my-pain' school of art. How indeed did we get from Whitman's superb, subtle, technically precise lines - 'That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades/Here by myself away from the clank of the world/Tallying and talk'd to here by tongues aromatic' - to the bizarre sexual jiggery-pokery of Marriott's 'Children of Adam'?

The forced comparison with Balanchine's choreography surely does show up the failings of 'Children of Adam' as poetry in motion. In the interval following 'Apollo', I overhead two elderly women talking excitedly, 'You could think it was old-fashioned - but every movement matters'. Every movement does indeed matter, exhibiting what Marianne Moore coined 'gossamer precision'. When Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, accepts her scroll from Apollo and dances a solo, her Allegretto variation is appropriately based on the iambic hexameter. Believe me - I was not sitting in the audience thinking, 'Aha -iambic hexameter!' (actually, the RoH produces superb programme notes). But the form and the execution of the choreography are both apparent and thrilling for the audience. Where matters of art and form are concerned, even the most untutored eye can tell the difference between a Wimpey home and the Taj Mahal. Please Alastair, you're a fine choreographer - just bear that in mind in future.

Till 24 March 2007