Alina Cojocaru delivers an astonishing performance in John Neumeier's ballet "Ghost Light" at Sadler's Wells in London, a meditation on time and theatre history that premiered with Hamburg Ballet in 2020.
Cojocaru, a guest dancer with London City Ballet who has worked regularly with Neumeier, embodies the piece's central conceit. A ghost light is the single lamp theatres leave burning on empty stages, and one glows throughout the work. Cojocaru enters in near silence, moving with what the review describes as almost mystical ethereality, evoking Swan Lake's Odette with fluttering wings and half-closed eyes as if lost in memory. The performance shifts when her steps glitch and she stumbles over a chair, jolting awake.
Neumeier uses the stage as a space haunted by dance history. The piece incorporates references to earlier ballet forms, including a stray sylph upstage, earnest solos, bright allegro passages and a tender duet between two young men who sometimes move in parallel worlds and sometimes connect directly. The work engages with theatre superstition that ghost lamps allow spirits of former dancers to return to the stage.
The programme also includes Glen Tetley's "Firebird," which the review notes offers material to value in the production.
Cojocaru's performance demonstrates what the review calls "divine delicacy" that embodies romantic ballet. Her ability to shift between dreamlike passages and abrupt moments of disconnection anchors the piece's exploration of memory, time and the theatre as a repository of dance tradition.