Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The audience were still finding their seats when the house lights went down. Much huffing and fumbling. William Forsythe, up to his old tricks in a triple bill for English National Ballet at Sadler’s Wells, which began an 11-show run on Thursday. At a scant 100 minutes (including interval) it’s a very short programme but packed with wit and virtuosity, showcasing a company on splendid form.Rearray was originally written in 2011 for the towering talents of Sylvie Guillem and fellow Paris Opera étoile Nicolas Le Riche, set to a stop-start tape of a David Morrow score. Rearray (London Edition 2025) ingeniously reworks the duet into a trio for Sangeun Lee, Henry Dowden and Rentaro Nakaaki. The super-concentrated 21-minute piece is performed on a bare stage in tights, trews, and T-shirts with lighting that regularly cuts out, allowing dancers to relocate (or simply disappear).Lee, dancing in pointe shoes rather than slippers, shares much of Guillem’s awesome facility. Balances are impossibly sustained, extensions absurdly high — that long, lean leg doesn’t so much rise as refuse to stay down. The two men watched entranced, gesturing to her brilliance with mannerly appreciation like courtiers enjoying a grand pas.The spiralling interplay between the three is cleverly done, mixing in solos and duets and ducking the go-to clichés of the pas de trois. As always with Forsythe, the textbook vocabulary is regularly undercut with a vaudevillian wriggle or a surly slouch.Rearray was weirdly low on jumps and batterie — as if the choreographer was challenging himself to manage without — but they were back in force for the quintet from 1992’s Herman Schmerman, set to a beepy Thom Willems soundtrack. This was all very surprising and postmodern back in the 1990s, but, while dazzlingly led by the spring-driven Francesco Gabriele Frola, it seems a mite chilly and formulaic now. Forsythe’s relentless deconstruction of classical technique can sometimes feel like the armature of a beautiful statue minus the covering curves.The evening ended with an exhilarating revival of Playlist (EP), first danced by ENB in 2022. In any other circumstances, its middle-of-the-soul soundtrack (Barry White, Natalie Cole) would feel like the Uber ride from hell but the peppy tunes give a sugar rush to the dance, which explodes across the stage with overwhelming largesse. Originally conceived as an all-male piece in 2018, the 46-strong 2022 version includes female ensembles and a fine pair of duets. Precious Adams and Junor Souza grooved through Cole’s “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” and Sangeun Lee and Gareth Haw, so exquisitely classical in their Giselle this January, showed their stylistic range in a pithy, razor-sharp dialogue to Khalid’s “Location”.The men still get the lion’s share, regularly taking issue with the laws of physics, individual talents peeling away from the stag line to show off their party pieces like members of a hip-hop crew. Frola’s grande pirouette melted into a skaterly swizzle and Erik Woolhouse fast-forwarded through a chain of impossible turns, earning flurries of delighted applause.★★★★★To April 19, sadlerswells.com
