Dance
Ismene Brown
The lighting chief holds the success of a magical fairy-tale staging in his hands. Whatever the designer has done, however fantastical and virtuosic his visions, the lighting chief can ruin it. So it is with English National Ballet’s new Nutcracker, in which two gigantic miscalculations kill any of its old-fashioned atmosphere. Act One is hobbled by a gauze dropped over the front of the stage for half of it; Act Two is sabotaged by ultra-violet lighting like a morgue fridge in a horror movie.How could Peter Farmer, the purveyor of herbaceous ballet designs, have contemplated permitting the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What a stunning show Matthew Bourne has created in his Blitz-era Cinderella - truly a magical ride created from what was in its original 1997 form a pumpkin waiting to be transformed. This must be the most heartwarming and sophisticatedly rewarding Christmas show in London, filled with a huge love of the city and a moving homage to humanity in wartime. Old newsreel, an eye for Powell and Pressburger style, some stunning sets, and - Bourne’s masterstroke - a brilliantly filmic recording of Prokofiev's score in sound-surround with much atmospheric enhancement all make this an exceptional Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In England you may joke about having Siberian weather with minus 7 degrees. This is really what Siberian winter looks like - at minus 26 degrees. The river is gushing steam, a hellishly peculiar sight. After travelling for 16 hours and through seven time zones to get to Krasnoyarsk at six in the morning, I am not sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing.Krasnoyarsk is plumb above Mongolia, and nearly the last stop east on the Trans-Siberian railway before you enter the empty white taiga, where almost no one can live. It is 4,000 kilometres back west to get to Moscow - and that’s only halfway back to Read more ...
judith.flanders
Fairy-tale ballets are a bitch. We all grow a mental image of what is “right” when we are about five, and then woe betide anyone whose vision is different – because of course it isn’t different, it’s “wrong”. So David Bintley and his designer, John Macfarlane, are up against audiences chock-full of preconceived notions. And I’m happy to say, after BRB’s premiere of their new Christmas show last night, they passed my inner-five-year-old test with flying colours.Cinderella is even trickier than most fairy-tale ballets. As I said last week, Prokofiev’s music is almost anti-fairy tale – it’ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The designer of a fairytale ballet is far, far more important than the choreographer. It's those visions that lodge themselves in children's heads, in adults' memories, embedded with the music. And at no time more potently than Christmas when it's time for The Nutcracker and Cinderella. When people think of ballet design they may think of John Macfarlane, the genius of Birmingham Royal Ballet's Nutcracker and the Royal Ballet's Giselle, and Peter Farmer, the confectioner of Birmingham's Coppelia and the Royal Ballet's latest Sleeping Beauty. Both men are stepping up to the plate again this Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is rare that you read a book, and mentally shout “Yes! Yes!” as you tick off all the things you agree with, but had never actually verbalised. It is even rarer to read a book where, in a subject you know pretty well, on almost every page you learn at least one fascinating new thing. But Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels is that book.Much has been made of Homan’s epilogue, in which she mourns the death of ballet, the art she so loves. I can understand her feelings – I even feel the same emotion that she does, at least in part. It’s merely that I think she’s wrong (the only place I do). Read more ...
judith.flanders
Christmas rolls around, and so does Cinderella, a welcome alternative to the seasonal dance-critic bah-humbug that is The Nutcracker. First, the good news. The good news is Marianela Nuñez. Always a lovely dancer, in Ashton she just glows. No one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s fiendishly difficult petite batterie, those tiny, beaten, viciously fast steps; no one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s light, bright jumps: with her sunny temperament and lovely punchy ballon Nuñez rises (literally) to the choreography’s demands.She is not an effortless dancer, not one of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If only such a bubble of foolish hype did not follow Wayne McGregor wherever he goes, such bloated talk of reinventing dance, injecting it with brains, and infusing it with new chemical sensitivities and practically supernatural powers, one would be able to look at what his contribution to theatre is more clearly. He is not the Heston Blumenthal of dance. Primarily McGregor can be thanked for bringing some ravishing and expensive lighting design to dance, under which his insectoid dancers twitch and scurry like moths and crane flies attracted to the flame. FAR, his new work premiered Read more ...
judith.flanders
“Nice is different from good,” sings one of Stephen Sondheim’s characters. And mostly, it is different, “nice” rarely being “good”. Christopher Bruce, however, blows that theory right out of the water, because Hush, his 2006 piece which opens Rambert’s Sadler’s Wells season, is both good and nice. And that’s much more remarkable than it seems: attempting to find the beauty, the depth and the radiance of “good” has caused many great artists to stumble. That Bruce achieves his goals with such serenity and power seems little short of miraculous.Hush is built around a series of numbers Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The spring 2011 season at Sadler’s Wells opens booking on 15 November. Featured attractions include horses and mass nudity on stage, the Pet Shop Boys' first ballet, William Forsythe, New York's American Ballet Theatre, the usual hip hop, flamenco and tango seasons, and generous helpings of Belgian and Catalan contemporary dance. Full season guide below. Autumn-Winter 2010 Lost Musicals, Darling of the Day, 22 Aug-19 Sep, The National Portrait Gallery’s Ondaatje Wing TheatreBased on Arnold Bennett's The Great Adventure, and adapted by Jule Styne (Gypsy, Funny Girl), E.Y. Harburg ( Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Scottish Ballet’s artistic director Ashley Page yesterday angrily made clear that when he leaves the company in 2012 it will be against his wishes. Last Thursday the company issued an emotionless brief statement that Page had “felt he was unable to accept” an extension to his contract, which ends after 10 years' work in 2012.Yesterday, however, Page’s agent issued a statement that he had on the contrary been eager to take a further three-to-five-year contract, but that he had felt "great disappointment" at the offer of only a single year as an interim measure while the company’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s a reasonable argument, I'd say, that it is only worth going out to see dance, or anything else, if it’s probably going to be better than telly or conversation with friends. And only if it’s also worth spending a couple of hours travel by train, say £30 to £40, tickets all told, plus a drink on the town. Something for the Arts Council to take on board when considering who to lash out £364,044 taxpayers’ annual subsidy on, no? Or too base a criterion?So much is now at stake for the future vigour of modern dance on British stages that we should not pussyfoot about any more. It might be Read more ...