dance

Onegin, Royal Ballet

Ismene Brown Thursday, 30 September 2010

One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg in the central roles last night for the Royal Ballet's opening salvo of the season, there wasn’t a hair's-breadth spare in the house, every place gone, even the standing ones in the gods where you can only...

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Russell Maliphant Company, AfterLight, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Thursday, 30 September 2010

We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a distilled 60-minute spell of dark, hushed beauty that touches on disturbing things: on ecstasy, madness, desire, jealousy, resignation to the void, and of course on Vaclav Nijinsky.

Birmingham Royal Ballet, Pointes of View, Birmingham Hippodrome

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 28 September 2010

Elisha Willis in Tharp's 'In the Upper Room': 'This is a thrilling, mesmerising dance'

It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties period piece, nestled capriciously like a matron en décolleté in the bosom of its season-opening bill fielding the semi-skimmed abstractness of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto and Twyla Tharp’s stunning Eighties sneaker...

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Scottish Ballet, Geometry + Grace, Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Ismene Brown Friday, 24 September 2010

Quietly, without pomp and fanfare, Ashley Page has been mustering a balletic strike force over the border in Scotland. Scottish Ballet has launched the new ballet year with a programme that trumps anything else offered in Britain as a season opener, two demanding and brilliant works of the past (well done) and the gamble of a new creation of dance, music and design.

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929, V&A

Judith Flanders Friday, 24 September 2010

Museum shows don’t often evoke a sense of smell, but without even trying, this Ballets Russes exhibition has visitors’ nostrils flared. The show is – intentionally – a feast for the eye, and even for the ear, with ballet scores (sometimes rudely overlapping) playing in every room. But smell?

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Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Prog 2, Peacock Theatre

Judith Flanders Wednesday, 22 September 2010

I have a friend who loves telling jokes. One night he started a well-worn story: “Please,” he said, “if you’ve heard this before, don’t stop me – it’s one of my favourites.” I am always reminded of that evening when watching Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo – the Trocks to their many thousands of fans across the world – when they touch down in London on one of their regular stops.

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Prog 2, Sadler's Wells

Judith Flanders Thursday, 16 September 2010

Matthew Rushing, Briana Reed, and Rosalyn Deshauteurs do their thing in Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is making one of its regular stops in Europe (the company tours commitedly: not only in the USA, but more than two months of each year are spent bringing their bravura dance style to the world). It is to their enduring credit, then, that their performances look as fresh and as spontaneous as they do.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Prog 1, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Wednesday, 15 September 2010

Alvin Ailey dancers have been dancing about survival, grit, positivity and joy in the Lord for half a century now, and even though the parents of last night’s dancers may not have been born when Ailey did the unthinkable and launched a black dance company in the dark days of 1958 America, the company still evidently has an urge to rejoice running in its veins.

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Shoes, Sadler's Wells Theatre

Ismene Brown Tuesday, 07 September 2010

The Health and Safety number: You too can leave your 'shoe-fession' on the Sadler's Wells site

Every time I go to Sadler’s Wells now I come out wondering if there’s something wrong with my hearing, so loud and numbing are their speakers. It’s a blight on a lot of shows, but on none more so than Shoes, because this is the first major London production written by that celebrated musical witsmith Mr Richard Thomas since his Jerry Springer, The Opera, and last night I missed probably half the words that I’m guessing should be the chief merit.

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theartsdesk MOT: Dirty Dancing, Aldwych Theatre

Ismene Brown Sunday, 05 September 2010

'Dirty Dancing': a class-crossing romance where the Fifties meet the Sixties with alarm

I suspect that more than half the audience that goes to see Dirty Dancing on stage has seen the 1987 movie, and that quite a few of them have seen the stage version more than once. There’s a strange feeling of being at a party where everyone knows everyone, and the party’s held nightly at the same house. It surely is not the misleading title that accounts for the wildly enthusiastic flow of fans - there’s nothing dirty about this squeaky-clean story, and there’s not that much...