Into the Music review: A bold triple bill from Birmingham Royal Ballet

Morgann Runacre-Temple’s joyfully weird ‘Hotel’ is a highlight in this trio of short works that focus on music

‘The Seventh Symphony’ with the Birmingham Royal Ballet (Johan Persson)

At the heart of Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Into the Music triple bill, there lurks a malevolent goose. Morgann Runacre-Temple’s new Hotel is a surreal look behind the scenes, using film and dance to evoke a workplace full of scurrying porters, plotting chefs, and stern management. The goose is just part of the goings-on, a bird conjured from a raincoat and a dancer’s arm.

Runacre-Temple and director Jessica Wright have collaborated on a series of dance film projects, including a new AI-inspired Coppélia for Scottish Ballet. In Hotel, they use live film to cut between locations: the public spaces are on stage, while bedrooms and offices show up on-screen, projected onto the walls of Sami Fendall’s set. Conducted by Koen Kessels, Mikael Karlsson’s new score has a filmic quality, ramping up tension or speeding through the action.

At first, the setup feels busy, without quite enough time to get to know the various characters. As the situations pile up, Runacre-Temple and Wright get freer and weirder. In a night-time sequence, filmed and physical dancers overlap, until you have to look twice to see who’s real.

And then there’s the goose: a joyfully weird sequence where dancer Sofia Liñares sits bundled up in her coat, then thrusts up an arm to become something else. Her weighted, shuffling walk and alert, beaky hand are hilarious and unsettling, an unexplained creature haunting the rest of the ballet. It’s a flight of fancy that lifts Hotel from a clever idea into something with real theatrical presence.

Hotel is the centrepiece of an evening that focuses on music, with two big scores handsomely conducted by Thomas Jung. Jiri Kylian’s Forgotten Land is danced to Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, with weighted flowing moves for six contrasting couples. Céline Gittens and Tyrone Singleton have a brooding intensity in the first duet.

The Seventh Symphony is a sugary setting of Beethoven by Uwe Scholz. Created in 1991, the ballet is a bright classical set piece, with a large corps de ballet and plenty of solo opportunities. Scholz’s steps aim for bravura but land on effortful: women are pulled along the ground as they do the splits, or carried along by jogging partners.

There’s some compensation in a bold company performance. Birmingham Royal Ballet dance with confident technique and strong personality. Gittens and Brandon Lawrence shine in the first movement, while Momoko Hirata and Tzu-Chao Chou bring fizz to the fourth.

Until 5 November. www.brb.org.uk