Dance
Jenny Gilbert
Unless you happen to be a student of Italian language or culture, the significance of the 14th-century poet Dante Alighieri’s insights into the human condition may have passed you by, albeit that this year marks 700 years since his death. Where every educated Italian knows the stories and characters within La divina commedia like the back of their hand, we British generally draw a blank. That general ignorance is what The Dante Project is up against and it was a fantastic gamble on the part of the Royal Ballet to believe that a posse of creative talents – choreographer Wayne MacGregor, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Two households, both alike in dignity … and both launching their respective seasons with a production of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. For neither the Royal Ballet nor its midlands sibling Birmingham Royal Ballet is this a surprising choice, given that it’s well over a year since either company was able to rally its forces in a full-blown three-act story ballet complete with full orchestra. Because there’s nothing quite like R&J for pulling a company together, with its teeming streetlife of squabbling servants, harlots and henchmen, its colourful elite and its stellar Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The British author Patrick Hamilton is best known for two highly successful plays, Rope (1929) and Gaslight (1939), which in turn became highly successful films. But it’s Hamilton’s novels, set among the fog-bound pubs and clubs of 1930s Soho, that have inspired Matthew Bourne’s latest enterprise, The Midnight Bell. With a cast of 12, this is small-scale compared with hits such as The Red Shoes and Swan Lake, but it’s far from small in ambition. After two hours in the theatre, you are hard pressed to identify a story, and yet those two hours of wordless dance-theatre are as affecting as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the ballet world, Colin Jones, who died on 22 September aged 85, was famous for being married, for a while, to the great Royal Ballet ballerina Lynn Seymour, during his brief career as a dancer with the company. In the wider world, however, Jones was renowned as a photographer of unusual empathy and social conscience, as well as a striking eye. A Sunday Times critic once described him as "the George Orwell of photojournalism".Ten years ago I met Colin Jones to talk about a new exhibition of his photographs, and our conversation roamed widely through his childhood experiences as an East End Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If a new ballet can be doomed by the weight of expectation, then Creature didn’t stand a chance. First scheduled to appear in the spring of 2020, then again last autumn, the publicity drive over the past weeks has had the air of marketing a used car that is taking up space in the showroom. As it turns out, Akram Khan’s latest big commission from English National Ballet was already doomed by the weight of its own bombast. What started out as an interesting idea, introducing elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, burst its bounds when climate change, the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If I had to sum up in a single impression the work I’ve seen of Brighton-based, Israeli-born choreographer Hofesh Shechter (now OBE), it would be that of a rock gig. His shows are noisy, populous affairs, and he writes his own drumbeat-driven music. There is invariably dry ice, harsh stadium-style lighting, and looping crescendos so long and so loud that your vertebrae start to thrum. Double Murder, however, is not like that. It’s a bit of a puzzle, not least because its title suggests a two-part onslaught that doesn’t transpire.“There’s always an assassination at some point” asserts someone Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Crisis-management has always been part of a choreographer’s skillset, but staging a new ballet with two large alternating casts has rarely been fraught with so much risk. It was one hell of a week for Valentino Zucchetti, first soloist at the Royal Ballet and creator of Anemoi, the 20-minute work that opens the final programme in the company’s 90th birthday season. In the last days of rehearsals the 33-year-old was already on the back foot, re-jigging sections of the piece as several dancers fell prey to injury. Then, 24 hours before opening night, disaster struck and half his cast were Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Having won recognition for his streetdance routines on American TV’s So You Think You Can Dance, choreographer Christopher Scott was asked to help bring Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton stage hit to the big screen. In The Heights was shot entirely on location on the streets of Washington Heights, a largely Dominican neighbourhood in New York. He tells theartsdesk's Jenny Gilbert how he went about creating the film's explosive dance scenes, and why he thinks the movie-musical is having a major resurgence.CHRISTOPHER SCOTT: I came to this film through commercial Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
“A tonic to the nation”. That was the hoped-for effect of the Festival of Britain in 1951, and its concrete legacy was the Royal Festival Hall. Seventy years on, it’s fitting that English National Ballet should be the first through its doors, post Covid closure, with the offer of another kind of pick-me-up – a summery, free-spirited, generous ballet gala which has something for everyone. Its umbrella title, Solstice, doesn’t just describe the timing of the 10-night run. It also reflects the warmth and bright positivity of this show.Today, ENB is a very different beast from its first, 1950s Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Albert Hall – 150 years old this year and with a commemorative £5 coin to prove it – is a great space for many kinds of spectacle but has done few favours for ballet. I make an exception for Derek Deane’s in-the-round Swan Lake, if only on the grounds of its having been seen by 750,000 people many of whom might never have set foot in an actual theatre. Many more ballet productions – even those carefully refigured for that giant O – have lost the fight with the capacious auditorium.So it was bold of Dame Darcey Bussell to book the venue for her big ballet charity gig. The aim Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
People often ask why it is that in ballet there are different casts on different nights, a practice alien to opera, musicals and theatre. The most obvious reason is practical. Ballet companies keep a number of principal dancers on salary who need regularly to strut their stuff. Another reason is that dancers develop distinct individual qualities – technical, musical and dramatic – which imprint on the works they dance. Add to that the mysterious chemistry of partnering, the capacity of one dancer to bring out the best in another, and you begin to understand why hardcore balletomanes beggar Read more ...
Robert Beale
Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again. Manchester Collective, true to their pioneering and resourceful nature, went one step further. They made films, in collaboration with others, whose viewing could happen in a venue as a kind of event in itself. The result is Dark Days, Read more ...