Dance
Jenny Gilbert
Visual artists gave up on titles long ago, resorting to neutral labels such as Untitled. Choreographers still feel bound to tag their works descriptively, which can be a challenge if the dance is about everything or nothing. The Irish director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan found a neat solution in MÁM , the 80-minute piece he made when he first arrived in West Kerry in 2019, choosing an Irish word that means so many things, and so many different things, that as a title it can only suggest everything and nothing all at once. A mountain pass, a burden or obligation, a handful of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2007, Pina Bausch was preparing her company’s latest “city piece”, this one based on a visit to Kolkotta. But she was also brewing up something special, a work for six of her long-serving women dancers, created separately from the city piece but out of the same set of questions.Even if Bausch hadn’t somehow sensed the need to do something for her female troupers while she could (she died suddenly in 2009), the piece is inherently like a memorial, a call for the dancers to be remembered. Indeed, they insist on it. These are regular self-exposers, anyway – a line of beauty queen contestants Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Few dancers have the luck to find a permanent place in history through their role in a new creation as Matz Skoog did in 1987. The Swedish star of the then London Festival Ballet, who died last weekend aged 69 from cancer, was one of the mesmerising original trio in a protest ballet that touched a nerve in its own era, and would then travel across four decades to become a classic. Swansong, choreographed by Christopher Bruce for Festival Ballet in a conscientious response to rising world protests at the disappearance of loved ones into the oblivion of Chilean prisons, seemed to portray a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The jury was out when Ballet Nights first made its pitch to the dance-curious – a potential audience, the thinking went, that might be nervous about signing up to the full three-act deal in an opera house but could be tempted by something more akin to a variety show, a curated mix of classical and contemporary with a compère to schmooze them through it. With no item lasting longer than 10 minutes and some as little as three, Ballet Nights would be a tasting menu, in effect, and each would be a one-off event. A nice idea, but is it sustainable? Apparently, yes. Three years on, Ballet Nights Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If modern and post-modern dance has a reputation for being earnest, then this latest curation of British and American pieces shows another face. For while there is rigour in Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s selection for her fine small company, there is also fun, colour and even louche behaviour. And for all the variety of moods and dynamics of these creations spanning 90 years, a silver thread connects them all. The late Robert Cohan, granddaddy of British contemporary dance, was once a dancer for American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, and every one of the choreographers presented here has felt Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
No one divides opinion quite like Wayne McGregor, Sir Wayne since 2024. He’s the closest thing to Marmite on the ballet scene. Either you’re excited by the brave-new-world qualities of his work – the forefronting of science and new tech, the diminution of emotion, the physical contortions, legs up past the ears every two minutes – or it leaves you cold. Woolf Works was his first full-length work for the Royal Ballet and is already old enough for the current revival to feature almost none of the dancers who helped create it in 2015. In practice, it feels less one three-act ballet than Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
“When it comes to a dance roundup, you surely won’t be able to come up with a Top Ten, will you? Even a Top Five might be a stretch”. This from a naysayer who clearly hasn’t been out much this past year. From where we stand, dance looks to have been doing rather well, and this despite the economic strictures we all know about. While it’s true that international touring is not what it was, and ballet fans can no longer get their summer fix from the Russians (and should probably give up hope of seeing a live performance by the Bolshoi or Mariinsky Ballet ever again), the Royal Opera House came Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Is there a neuroscientist in the house? I need a latterday Oliver Sacks to tell me about earworms, specifically earworms issuing from the music of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. I should explain. At about this time every year, for days and sometimes weeks following exposure to The Nutcracker, I am plagued by bits of its score playing on a loop in my head. Not the big hummable tunes like the "Waltz of the Flowers" in Act II, nor the massive bass trombone-led crescendo that accompanies the growing Christmas tree, but snippets, linking passages, what might technically be called the score’s Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Filmmakers Powell and Pressburger were not the first to portray ballet dancing as a fatal obsession and choreographer Matthew Bourne won’t be the last, but the latter’s 2016 stage adaptation of The Red Shoes, Powell's 1948 film (now most famous as a favourite of Martin Scorsese), looks set for longevity nonetheless. Deftly invoking the postwar European dance scene and bringing sharp definition to the film’s plot and characters, the show brims with added entertaining detail. Hurtling to its dénouement, it also undercuts the film by half an hour.Bourne’s production, as in the film, follows the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The ballet world will soon run out of titles signifying a renaissance. After ENB’s recent Re:evolution comes London City Ballet’s Rebirth, following its debut programme last year called Resurgence. In LCB’s case, the term is quite literal.The company resurfaced, after a nearly 30-year hiatus, under the directorship of Christopher Marney, whose formula for the new-look group is a winning one. Bring together fine dancers from all corners of the globe and send them out to perform in smaller venues, where they can explore rich, sometimes under-explored seams in the modern ballet repertoire. Add Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
As the new season opens, confidence is high at ENB, just as it should be given the roaring success of recent programmes featuring the latest work of iconoclast William Forsythe. His classical steps set to disco raised the roof.The company’s current mixed bill, R:Evolution, also contains some Forsythe, but within a more sober, even academic frame, the idea being to track the evolution of ballet across eight decades: from George Balanchine and Martha Graham – two distinct voices of the 1940s – to a Forsythe classic from 1992, to a grandly conceived new work from internationalist David Dawson. Read more ...