Dance
Jenny Gilbert
Twelve years may have passed since her earthly demise, but you still hear people say they saw Pina Bausch the other night. Bausch remains synonymous with the company she founded, Tanztheater Wuppertal, and with a style of dance theatre that launched an entire new category. Filled with a brooding sense of the past, often specifically Germany’s past, Bausch’s works are less like ballets, more like choreographed group-psychotherapy. Dressed formally, as if for an evening out in the 1930s, her performers parade their secret frustrations and desires, blurt out verbal confessions or enact Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Neglected classics, whether books, plays or ballets, are usually neglected for a reason, and so it is with the three-act ballet Raymonda. A hit in 1898 for the Imperial ballet in St Petersburg but unperformed in this country since the 1960s, its ineffectual heroine, fuzzy sense of geography and offensively silly plot have made it impossible to stage in full – at least in Britain. In Russia, whose ballet culture has a higher tolerance of such things, the work remains central to the repertoire, complete with foiled kidnap by a muslim villain but minus more than half the original choreography, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It was never going to be a bumper year, just a bumpy one. With theatres dark until May or later, the usual 11 or 12 months of potential live-dance going was reduced to four or five. There was one bright shaft of optimism in late spring, and another in the autumn, when the gloom-clouds parted to allow a few weeks of almost-normality. But now we seem to have come full circle. In the past 10 days three out of London’s four Nutcrackers have either closed or been drastically postponed – one of them to this time next year. The show must go on, it will go on. Just not yet.That doesn’t mean that, for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The legendary quip of a sophisticated ballet critic that we are all one Nutcracker nearer death never rang so true as now. One goes to the theatre with one’s heart in one’s mouth, behind the partypooping mask.Matthew Bourne’s dance panto Nutcracker! had its very fresh charms in 1992 – the classical skit that launched a path to a knighthood, naughtiness nicely bedecked in every shade of pink, on stage and in innuendo. I observed from its press night audience at Sadler’s Wells last night that a good half of them could not have been out of nappies in 1992, or even born. A generation of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
How do you picture Gene Kelly? Most likely in his effervescent screen persona, either as the burly ex-GI of An American in Paris, or as the hoofer without a raincoat in Singin’ in the Rain.You’re less likely to picture him peering through a movie camera lens. Yet of the 47 films Kelly made over his 50-year career, he directed 11 of them and was choreographer on 27. His legacy, he believed, was what he delivered behind the camera, not in front of it.He also attained the distinction, in 1960, of being the first American commissioned to choreograph for the Paris Opera Ballet (George Balanchine Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Not so long ago, a few decades at most, anyone with a passing interest in dance knew what “modern” looked like. It was earthbound, usually barefoot, and it focussed on mundane movements such as walking or lying down as often as it looked like dance. It sometimes even turned up its nose at being seen in a theatre. Past Present, a programme put together by the dancer Yolande Yorke-Edgell, was designed to shed light on the trajectory of contemporary dance over the past 90 years, prompted by the recent loss of one of its most important movers and shakers (pictured below), a creator and Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The colour of a shoe might seem a trivial thing. But when in 2018 the dancewear manufacturer Freed launched the UK’s first range of pointe shoes to match darker skin tones, true equal opportunity in British ballet came a big step closer. The initiative came partly from the African-American dancer Cira Robinson who, during her time in New York with Dance Theatre of Harlem, had long since stopped having to buy standard shell-pink pointes and dye them in cold tea, and was shocked to find the UK ballet shoe market lagging so far behind.Robinson is now a senior artist with Ballet Black, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When a great performer takes on the running of a ballet company, the effect on its dancers can be transformative. It happened when Mikhail Baryshnikov took on American Ballet Theatre in the 1980s. It’s been happening at English National Ballet since 2012 under Tamara Rojo.Now it’s the turn of Birmingham Royal Ballet to up its game under the influence of Carlos Acosta, who brings not only his under-the-skin experience, but new tastes and ideas, globally formed. The second edition of Carlos Curates – a triple bill of work new to the company and to British audiences – shows the dancers visibly Read more ...
David Nice
“I want to tell her that people will be good,” Tewodros Aregawe of Phosphoros Theatre confided to us as Little Amal closed her eyes on the giant bed made up for her in the Paul Hamlyn Hall, “that all the people with kind eyes who have walked alongside her and listened to her story will be louder than those who wish she wasn’t there”.It’s a Utopian vision that has largely gone hand in hand with the three-and-a-half metre tall creation of the wonderful Handspring Puppet Company on her 8000 kilometre journey from the Turkish-Syrian border, though even this ultimate exercise in magical moving Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Ballet dancers, even the greatest, don’t expect longevity. There are no Maggie Smiths or Helen Mirrens in the ballet world – there just aren’t the roles. So the news that Alessandra Ferri was to mark the 40th anniversary of her association with the Royal Ballet (she joined aged 17) with a run of performances of a one-woman show was of more than passing interest. L’Heure exquise was created by the choreographer Maurice Béjart in the late 1990s as a vehicle for another great Italian ballerina, Carla Fracci, when Fracci was 62, and it has been performed very little since.The 70-minute piece is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Leonard Bernstein’s one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti enjoyed a relatively trouble-free gestation, at least compared to his other stage works. Its seven short scenes last around 50 minutes, Bernstein providing his own libretto and completing much of this acerbic, occasionally bitter study of a marriage in crisis whilst on his own honeymoon in 1951.The edginess is reflected in the music, Bernstein perpetually on the cusp of giving us a jazzy showstopper, only to pull back at the last minute. The big numbers, when they come, are as affecting as anything Bernstein ever wrote – especially a Satie- Read more ...