Into the Music review: A bold triple bill from Birmingham Royal Ballet

Morgann Runacre-Temple’s joyfully weird ‘Hotel’ is a highlight in this trio of short works that focus on music

‘The Seventh Symphony’ with the Birmingham Royal Ballet (Johan Persson)

At the heart of Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Into the Music triple bill, there lurks a malevolent goose. Morgann Runacre-Temple’s new Hotel is a surreal look behind the scenes, using film and dance to evoke a workplace full of scurrying porters, plotting chefs, and stern management. The goose is just part of the goings-on, a bird conjured from a raincoat and a dancer’s arm.

Runacre-Temple and director Jessica Wright have collaborated on a series of dance film projects, including a new AI-inspired Coppélia for Scottish Ballet. In Hotel, they use live film to cut between locations: the public spaces are on stage, while bedrooms and offices show up on-screen, projected onto the walls of Sami Fendall’s set. Conducted by Koen Kessels, Mikael Karlsson’s new score has a filmic quality, ramping up tension or speeding through the action.

At first, the setup feels busy, without quite enough time to get to know the various characters. As the situations pile up, Runacre-Temple and Wright get freer and weirder. In a night-time sequence, filmed and physical dancers overlap, until you have to look twice to see who’s real.