‘At first I was terrified by it!’: The Royal Ballet brings back Pierrot Lunaire’s classic music from the 1960s | Dance

MArcelino Sampi hanging upside down from a scaffold tower. “It’s scary,” he told me. Nevertheless, he staggers, faints, balances his tangled limbs around the narrow bars, and reaches for an imagined star-filled sky (it is actually the soaring ceiling of the Royal Ballet’s training studio in Covent Garden). This is the iconic opening of Pierrot Lunaire’s ballet, in which a childlike clown is startled by the sight of the moon.

Created in 1962 by American choreographer Glenn Tetley – whose centenary is celebrated this year – Pierrot Lunaire is a distinctive, eccentric and challenging work, set to Arnold Schoenberg’s tone song cycle of the same name. It is based on poems by Albert Giroux, delivered in 2008 com. sprechstimmea vocal style halfway between song and speech that sometimes sounds like a children’s sing-song, and in other places like a ghostly auditory apparition. This ballet is not performed regularly – the last time the Royal Ballet danced it was 20 years ago – but it has a special place with ballet actors, as a pioneering example of mixing modern dance with classical dance, and as a thrilling male lead role as the sad clown Piero, a commedia dell’arte character here on an emotional journey of surprising depth. This was Rudolf Nureyev’s favorite ballet, apparently.

This season, Pierrot will dance alternately between the Royal Ballet’s principal Sambi, one of the company’s leading men, and soloist Joshua Junker. Sampey is popular for his sunny, triumphant energy, but here he taps into his wide-eyed, vulnerable side, as Pierrot’s hopeful naivete is punctured by his encounters with Columbine, the object of his unrequited affection, and his nemesis Brighella, whom Tetley calls “the dark clown of experience.”

“For a while, I found it really difficult to connect with this piece,” says Sampey, who saw the character as traditionally two-dimensional, but working with Christopher Bruce, who was a popular interpreter of the role in the 1960s, opened it up. “What makes it so poignant and emotional is that this archetype is full of human traces,” Sampey says. “It’s about bringing something of my own DNA into it. It’s a layered comedy but based in the dark, a place of great contemplation and self-discovery and curiosity.”

Juncker sees this piece as a journey from innocence to adulthood and the harsh realization: “There is pain, there is suffering, and there is responsibility.” “It’s a really symbolic piece,” he says. “Brigilla is his own personality but also represents Piero’s inner relationship with himself, like the shadow in Jungian psychology.”

Both dancers initially found the music challenging. “At first I was terrified of it!” Sambi says. He had previously danced to Schoenberg’s more romantic sextet Verklärte Nacht, which he loved, “but this was perhaps the least accessible of his works to me.” The mercurial vocals of the small instrumental ensemble and the soprano’s swooping delivery create a strange, imaginative, funny and strange mood. Music is often a rhythmic drive for a dancer, “but with this piece, music becomes a feeling,” says Sampey. “It’s almost like a living being in itself, with its own veins and blood.” He has adapted to it. “Now I find myself in the kitchen, chopping onions, and listening to Piero Lunaire.”

Tetli himself was Pierrot I. His early dance career was spent in the 1940s and 1950s with classical companies (Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theater) and at the forefront of modern dance, working with Hania Holm and Martha Graham. He brought all of these influences to his choreography, blending the more contemporary use of the body with classical steps – revolutionary at the time. He was instrumental in bringing this style to the UK as well, helping the company then called Ballet Rambert transform into a modern dance company.

Pierrot Lunaire is 40 minutes long and, unusually, for these performances, the ballet will be performed as a stand-alone piece, rather than as part of a double or triple bill. “It will be a very intimate experience,” Junker says. “Just the three of us, close to a small stage, so there can be a real focus on the dancers and the music.” (Music will be played live). Sambi describes it as “putting on a magnifying glass [Tetley’s] Learning ballet was an education for Sampey, “to understand more about this modernist moment in dance, the influence of Martha Graham and this new era of movement, and the high level of craftsmanship.”

He was inspired by the fact that choreographers and composers of the era were deliberately challenging their audiences. “It’s something that’s confronting, not just a relaxing ballet,” he says. “We don’t get to experience something like this very often anymore, at least in the dance I see,” he predicts. “It will be uncomfortable, funny, poignant, sad and beautiful at the same time.” “It leaves you with more questions. I love this work.”