Mariinsky
Black-Out Ballet: The Invisible Woman of British BalletTuesday, 11 December 2012
In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that she ran now a forgotten name? This was what I set... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Choreographer & Ballet-Restorer Pierre LacotteSaturday, 10 November 2012
On 25 November cinemas all over Britain and overseas will host a live relay from the Bolshoi Ballet of a rampantly OTT and enormously entertaining ballet set in ancient Egypt, The Pharaoh's Daughter. It has mummies coming to life, English tourists... Read more... |
theartsdesk Olympics: The Golden AgeThursday, 19 July 2012
Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage.... Read more... |
Matthew Bourne's Early Adventures, Richmond TheatreSaturday, 02 June 2012
Matthew Bourne’s charm is a rare and cheering thing in the world of dance - a night out with three of his earliest works, Spitfire, Town & Country and The Infernal Galop, is akin to sitting down to watch Father Ted or Dad’s Army. It’s clever,... Read more... |
Verdi Requiem, Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus, Gergiev, Barbican HallThursday, 05 April 2012
After conducting two performances of Parsifal since Saturday and one of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, most human beings would be spending a day curled up at home. But Valery Gergiev doesn’t know what carpet slippers look like. Besides, he’s currently on... Read more... |
Mahler Eighth, Mariinsky Orchestra/Gergiev, Wales Millennium CentreMonday, 02 April 2012
Gergiev’s second Cardiff concert was thematically linked to his first. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony shares with Parsifal a certain kind of solipsistic religiosity that talks about God in the way some people talk about their ancestors. We don’t really... Read more... |
Russian Ballet Icons Gala: Celebrating Anna Pavlova, London ColiseumMonday, 05 March 2012
Fokine, the founding choreographer of the Ballets Russes, wrote on Anna Pavlova’s death, “Pavlova will be the dream of many generations, a dream of beauty, of the gladness of movement.” The superb array of international stars of ballet last night... Read more... |
Men in Motion, Sadler's Wells TheatreSaturday, 28 January 2012
Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that... Read more... |
2011: From Russia - With Love?Saturday, 31 December 2011
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-... Read more... |
2011: Ballerinas, Cuts and the Higgs Boson TheorySaturday, 31 December 2011
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell... Read more... |
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Mariinsky Opera, Gergiev, Edinburgh Festival TheatreFriday, 02 September 2011
Under Western eyes, Gergiev’s Mariinsky forces had been turning to stone – like the titular shadowless woman's solipsistic husband in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s polyphonic fairy tale – each time they stepped outside the Russian... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Swan Lake, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, GergievMonday, 15 August 2011
The fact that the world’s most popular ballet score had never, until last night, been performed in full at the Proms says something about the lowly regard in which musical circles long held composition for ballet. The fact that the Albert Hall’s... Read more... |
