Wearable scenery, 'dinosaur' costumes and the return of ballet

A little way into my Zoom exchange with choreographer Will Tuckett, I ask him the current Big Question for anyone in his profession: what future does dance – only just restarting after a long, Covid-enforced absence – have in Britain?

On one hand, he believes that we’re about to go through a “decimating of the arts scene. And I think as a result of that, people who work in the arts will undergo a lot of hardship, lose their jobs, and have to retrain just to put food on the table”.

“But,” he continues, “the thing that I feel very strongly, with the artists I’ve been working with and talking to across disciplines, is that artists will make art, however that finds its way through. It’s like having a water leak – artists are like having bad plumbing, in that they will always find the smallest crack. And I have faith in artists, young and old – I know that they will find their way of making their voices heard.”

Tuckett’s own “voice” will be heard loud and proud this week, thanks to Lazuli Sky, his Covid-inspired piece for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s forthcoming, season-launching triple bill. A collaboration with Birmingham Rep, it premieres there on Thursday, before moving to Sadler’s Wells next week. And it will be the first substantial new dance work to be performed live in front of a British audience in eight months.

It was back in May – several weeks into lockdown – that BRB’s new director, Carlos Acosta, rang Tuckett to suggest he create a piece for them inspired by the nation’s straitjacketed situation. Tuckett’s response was simple: “Give me some dancers, and I will make the show!”

Birmingham-born and Royal Ballet School-trained, Tuckett was a sensible man to approach. A choreographer of rare versatility and lightness of touch, the 52-year-old father-of-one has created work for A-list dance, opera and theatre companies across the globe. He was the man behind the Royal Ballet’s The Wind in the Willows (the first Royal Opera House show ever to have a West End transfer), and as it happens is a fantastic “character” dancer in his own right – his curmudgeonly matriarch Widow Simone, in the Royal Ballet’s production of La Fille mal gardée, is the finest and funniest I have ever seen.

However, what no one imagined at the start was just how long the enforced quarantine would carry on.

“When I spoke later to Carlos,” says Tuckett, “I said, ‘Oh, this is a bit of a nightmare. We’re making a piece about this moment in time, but this moment is carrying on.’ We all thought, naively, that we would be out of it soon…”

As you might imagine in the current climate – with dance the most tactile of art forms – the work’s very existence has been unfeasibly hard-won, the “rules” for its creation constantly shifting beneath Tuckett’s and his 12-strong cast’s feet with each new Covid-related edict from No 10.

“At first,” he says, “it was just, ‘This is going to take a little bit longer’. But then, it was, ‘Hold on, what if nobody can touch anybody else?’ So I thought, ‘Well, we can make a piece where nobody touches – that can be what the piece is about.’ And then we learnt that we are going to be able to touch – but would need a bubble. So: how do we do that? And how close can I get to the dancers?”

The solution was to have a bubble that included Tuckett and the entire cast, and for them to wear masks constantly in rehearsals (“It’s pretty grim, but we’re all totally used to it”). But there were further creative limitations. “We weren’t allowed any set,” he says, “partly because it’s an abstract piece and it needs to tour a lot – which are the normal things one would think about – but also because if the crew are placing it on stage, you then have to disinfect it before anybody else can get close to it, because they’re from different bubbles.”

The work’s title, says Tuckett, has two, intertwined roots. For one thing, it’s the way people, under lockdown, would gaze out through their windows “at the sky, without chemtrails from aeroplanes, literally becoming bluer every day”. But also, he continues, “Lapus Lazuli, a semi-precious stone that was crushed up during the Renaissance [for ultramarine pigment], can only be found in one very small bit of Afghanistan, and so it was incredibly expensive. It was used to depict blue sky – and we, now, have paid so dearly to see our blue sky.”

Sky is to figure in the images that will be beamed on to the stage, courtesy of Tuckett’s collaborators Samuel Wyer (design), Nina Dunn (projections) and Peter Teigen (lighting). “The projections,” he says, “are all of nature: skies, waves, grass, cracked earth, ripples. But everything has been digitally treated, layered, slowed right down.”

Abstract and in three sections, the work itself – which I watch in rehearsal (thanks again to Zoom) – bears the Tuckett hallmark of easy, space-filling musicality, with choreographer and dancers alike making lively and lyrical use of John Adams’s 1978 piece Shaker Loops. “I didn’t want to make a piece that felt maudlin, that was introspective,” says the choreographer. “I thought, for an audience, that you can’t ignore where we’ve been, but you don’t want to go and see something that’s only angst-ridden.”

The work also, in the slower middle section, sees male and female dancers alike don extravagant folding skirts of lightweight, papery fabric. The idea is that these will both catch the projections – like ever-metamorphosing scenery – and poetically suggest distancing.

“When you unfurl them,” says Tuckett brightly, they’re a bit like those lizards in Jurassic Park” – the “collared”, not-very-nice Dilophosaurus, in case you were wondering – “and the dancers are then sitting with about two-and-a-half metres on either side of them. So, just by the very nature of the outfits, they are socially distancing.”

The Adams score – to be played live, in its original, septet form – is proving a cunning help in evoking the 2020 experience. “There are points in the third movement, with these different musical ‘loops’ going on, where the piece keeps incrementally getting faster and then dropping back. Music just isn’t supposed to do that in a classical setting. It gives you this strange feeling in the pit of your stomach, and it feels like where we’ve been, these moments of real nervous tension.”

He gives, as an example, the stop-start nature of education since schools reopened in September.

“[Parents] go, ‘Right, well, everything’s arranged for next week, the childcare’s there, I’m going to be working, you’re going to be working, we’ve worked out how to do it,’ and then suddenly everything shifts – somebody’s parents in the class are ill, and they’ve been taken out of school. The tension racks up, then it’s released again, and so on.

“I didn’t think this when I chose the music,” he confesses, “but the piece has really moved with us as we’ve been making it, in the way that the world has been working.”

Just before the inevitable mouse-click brings our conversation to a close, I suggest to Tuckett that his clutch of young BRB dancers (all soloists or members of the corps) must, after so long away from creating dance, have been grateful to have found themselves in a studio with him.

“I’m constantly astonished that anyone’s grateful to be in any situation with me,” he says with a broad, disarming grin. “My long-suffering wife, you know – it’s like, ‘God, it’s you again…’ I was so overwhelmed by how lucky I was to be there. I just felt like all my Christmases came at once.”

Lazuli Sky is at Birmingham Rep (birmingham-rep.co.uk) from Thurs-next Sat, and at Sadler’s Wells (sadlerswells.com) from Oct 29-31. Returns only.