Chroma is a one-act contemporary ballet made by Wayne McGregor for the Royal Ballet, first performed at the Royal Opera House on 17 November 2006. It is a ten-dancer chamber work set against a stark white set by architect John Pawson, danced to a score combining original music by Joby Talbot with his orchestral arrangements of three White Stripes songs.
What it contains
- Contemporary Ballet · the whole one-act work — female dancers work entirely off pointe throughout, the choreography is characterised critically as a 'tension between chaos and minimalism', signalling a contemporary extension of classical ballet vocabulary rather than classical technique itself Source: "Chroma is a one-act contemporary ballet created by Wayne McGregor for the Royal Ballet."
What is danced
The ballet is danced by ten dancers, and the article specifies that the women perform entirely off pointe, a deliberate departure from classical convention for a Royal Ballet mainstage work. The choreography is described only in critical shorthand rather than step-by-step detail: The Guardian is quoted calling the piece a 'tension between chaos and minimalism', which points to a vocabulary that pushes extension, speed and off-balance partnering against the extreme architectural restraint of Pawson's white box set.
The article does not give a scene-by-scene or number-by-number breakdown, so no internal structure of solos, duets or ensemble sections can be established from it. What is confirmed is the scale and cast: an ensemble of five men and five women drawn from Royal Ballet principals and soloists, several of whom (Edward Watson, Steven McRae, Eric Underwood) became recurring interpreters of McGregor's subsequent work, suggesting the piece demands a specific hyperextended, off-centre physicality that these dancers went on to specialise in — though the article itself does not describe that vocabulary directly.
Context
Chroma was only McGregor's second work for the Royal Opera House main stage, following pieces made for the smaller Linbury Studio Theatre, and it arrived at a moment when the Royal Ballet — an institution built on the classical and neoclassical legacies of Ashton and MacMillan — was testing how far a contemporary, non-balletically-trained choreographer's language could sit on its principal stage. Its success directly changed the company's institutional structure.
Staging history
The Royal Ballet has revived Chroma repeatedly and toured it, and the work has since been staged by National Ballet of Canada (2010), San Francisco Ballet (2011), Bolshoi Ballet (2011) and The Australian Ballet (2014). In 2013 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater became the first modern-dance company to take it into repertory, and in 2016, for the tenth anniversary, the Royal Ballet performed it with five Ailey dancers joining the cast. A 2011 Opus Arte DVD paired it with McGregor's Infra and Limen, and a 2015 Ailey performance at Lincoln Center was filmed and later released online.
How to watch it
Watch for the contrast between the dancers' extreme, off-pointe, hyperextended movement and the flat white architectural set, which the choreographer commissioned specifically as a blank canvas. Note the score's own hybridity — Joby Talbot's orchestral writing interleaved with his arrangements of White Stripes tracks — and how the choreography shifts register between the two. The absence of pointework throughout is itself a statement within a company whose identity is built on classical technique.
Credits
- composer: Jack White
- composer: Joby Talbot