![\"Sweet](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Sweet-V.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOn a pedestal or on a slab \u2013 are these the default settings for women in ballet? A friend decided not to join me at the Royal Ballet yesterday. Having seen the ads for its latest triple bill, he feared that Sweet Violets<\/em><\/a>, about the Jack the Ripper murders, would glamourise violence against women.<\/p>\n Every eminent Victorian bar Florence Nightingale has been suspected of being Jack the Ripper<\/a>, and Liam Scarlett\u2019s ballet gathers many of them. The central figure is the painter Walter Sickert <\/a>(famously the crime writer Patricia Cornwell\u2019s prime suspect). Also in the line up <\/a>are Sickert\u2019s friend Robert Wood (later arrested but not charged\u00a0in connection with\u00a0the Camden Town\u00a0Murder in 1907); Queen Victoria\u2019s dissolute grandson; Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister; and a psycho hallucination called Jack.<\/p>\n Is Sweet Violets<\/em> a rapey exploitation flick of a ballet? To be frank, its crimes are mostly against narrative coherence. I saw the one-acter during its first run, and was even more bewildered this time round. Scarlett makes lyrical abstract ballets and pervy story ones \u2013 as in his Hansel and Gretel, he\u2019s great at creating murky mood (especially to the vehement Rachmaninov score), but hasn\u2019t yet nailed a way to communicate motive without confusion.<\/p>\n Steven McRae and Laura Morera in Sweet Violets Photo: Tristram Kenton<\/p><\/div>\n The details are baffling, but you get the drift: Victorian prudery be damned. The men are all domineering hornbuckets, paddling greedily in lady parts. Even the Prime Minister marches into artists\u2019 studios or backstage at the music hall to rough up a tart. All the women give their best sluttish splaying, or strike an attitude known in classical ballet as \u2018fancy a jig-jig, mister?\u2019 We don\u2019t see anyone who isn\u2019t on, or at least in, the game: every woman is a model-hyphen-prostitute, dancer-hyphen-prostitute, madwoman-hyphen-prostitute. To watch Sweet Violets<\/em>, you\u2019d imagine that Queen Victoria was the only woman of her era not doing it up against a wall for thruppence.<\/p>\n Scarlett and his design team create a tense mood of toxic sexual relations, infecting the movement vocabulary \u2013 every time a man puts hands on a woman, to turn, spin or lift her, it looks like a power move. Every support is an attempt at control, every touch an unwholesome grab at flesh.<\/p>\n Wading through the guts of Victorian London, Sweet Violets<\/em> works best as a fantasia of period misogyny. Try and work out who\u2019s who and why, and your brain will hurt. Most effective is Jack, Sickert\u2019s provoking hallucination (played with sickening sprightliness by Steven McRae). Sidling round corners, goading Sickert\u2019s mucky thoughts, he\u2019s the id of pure evil, and doesn\u2019t need to explain himself. The designs by John Macfarlane and David Finn inhabit a territory informed by Sickert\u2019s own smeary palette <\/a>\u2013 muddled greys, muddied whites, livid gasps of scarlet.<\/p>\n So was my pal right to sit it out? The murders themselves are staged without lingering, and Scarlett\u2019s intentions are earnest, if over-insistent \u2013 he pushes heavily on the unbalanced sexual dynamic. His women frequently get down to their scanties, while men remain fully dressed for sex and violence. The Prime Minister merely rolls his cuffs back before smacking a drab. On a narrative level, the inclusion of members of the government and royal family makes little sense \u2013 but they\u2019re there, I think, to demonstrate how ravenous misogyny runs like a virus through the bloodstream of 19th-century masculinity. Who is Jack the Ripper? Victorian manhood, that\u2019s who.<\/p>\n Ballet should be in shoo-in for a feminist night out. So many women occupying centre stage, out-dazzling the guys. Not for them the measly dribble <\/a>of cameo stereotypes \u2013 disposable girlfriend, careworn mum, random shag \u2013 dispensed by big and small screen dramas, or the Shakespearean heroines outnumbered by boots and breeches. Ballet is, by and large, all about the women.<\/p>\n Except that it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s not just that male dancers are getting some heat at the moment \u2013 bouncy boys like Ivan Vasiliev, Steven McRae, Vadim Muntagirov and Kimin Kim<\/a>, the latest Mariinsky sensation. It\u2019s that wherever artistic directors and choreographers gather, you\u2019re swamped by Y-chromosomes. Women are still expected to adorn the stage \u2013 to dance and perform amazing, intrepid feats, but not to set the agenda.<\/p>\n Lauren Cuthbertson in Serenade Photo: Johan Persson\/ROH<\/p><\/div>\n There\u2019s something about that feeling in the Royal\u2019s triple bill \u2013 enjoyably diverse as it is. Balanchine was always a sucker for a muse, and Serenade<\/em>, his lyrical first American ballet from 1934, fills the stage with romantic waft. Watching from above, you\u2019re reminded of his contemporary Busby Berkeley<\/a>: not exactly hundreds of beautiful girls, but an awful lot, forming and reforming patterns \u2013 diagonals, squares, circles \u2013 like a kaleidoscope of swoon. Geometry meets poetry (not to mention biology).<\/p>\n Certainly don\u2019t want to disparage the compelling ballerinas. Lauren Cuthbertson and Laura Morera in particular dig forcefully into Sweet Violets<\/em>. Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s DGV<\/em> isn\u2019t my favourite ballet, but felt like a tonic to close the evening. After all that romance and rippering, how bracing to see powerful women claiming to the stage like Olympians. They shouldn’t be the exception.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>