Dance
Ismene Brown
Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.Shakespeare’s play was premiered in 1596 - not until 1776 did the first opera on it emerge, Romeo und Julie by Georg Benda, a near-contemporary of Haydn and Kapelmeister to the Duke of Gotha who Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Blitz may be about to descend on dance in theatres, but Rambert have the authentic British grit under fire. They truck on into a bleak autumn with the courage to present to the straitened nation a new commission of music and dance, and a new acquisition from an unknown German choreographer. Perhaps most radically, three female choreographers on one bill (and that’s not something I’ve known in my lifetime, at least not at this level).But there is no need to be PC about it. If the commission - Awakenings, by Aletta Collins, based on Dr Oliver Sacks’s celebrated book - doesn’t come to life Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Nico Muhly at the piano, Stephen Petronio in a false beard, a storm-at-sea theme derived from The Tempest - how hip is that? I Drink the Air Before Me, a new work for the Stephen Petronio Company as the opening night of this year’s Dance Umbrella (the annual international modern dance fest that packs London’s venues for the month), had promise. The young composer delivered, the theme had its moments, but the picture above is a fiction - it’s a wish-list, as so many publicity stills for dance are, fine tailfeathers for dull birds. A couple of hours later I grope for my notebook to remember the Read more ...
judith.flanders
This is the second part of a series that has passed a little too quietly for comfort. The V&A’s grand Diaghilev show has received all the noise in the press – “fabulous”, “sumptuous”, “exotic” – in fact, all the words that were used at the time to describe Diaghilev’s company. The only word that isn’t being used is “dancer” – we get relatively little chance to think about movement in South Kensington. However, Jane Pritchard, curator of that show, has now redressed the balance on the South Bank with a remarkable collection of films.
At first glance, the season might seem ordinary – Read more ...
Ismene Brown
One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg in the central roles last night for the Royal Ballet's opening salvo of the season, there wasn’t a hair's-breadth spare in the house, every place gone, even the standing ones in the gods where you can only see a sliver of the stage.Lucky audience to see this stellar pair of dance-actors attempting with all their Read more ...
charlotte.macmillan
New photographs by Charlotte MacMillan of Russell Maliphant's expanded Afterlight, a mesmerising new dancework premiered at Sadler's Wells this week. The portfolio adds stills from the substantial new sections to ones she took a year ago of the opening solo created for a Diaghilev tribute programme.Russell Maliphant explains his original inspiration by Nijinsky's drawings to theartsdesk here. The dancers are Daniel Proietto, Olga Cobos and Silvina Cortés. Lighting is by Michael Hulls, conceived in combination with Es Devlin, costumes by Stevie Stewart, music by Andy Cowton and Erik Satie. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a distilled 60-minute spell of dark, hushed beauty that touches on disturbing things: on ecstasy, madness, desire, jealousy, resignation to the void, and of course on Vaclav Nijinsky.Maliphant made a solo last year for Sadler’s Wells on a Diaghilev tribute programme. It whirled like Nijinsky’s paintings from his hospital, where the young dancer retreated all Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties period piece, nestled capriciously like a matron en décolleté in the bosom of its season-opening bill fielding the semi-skimmed abstractness of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto and Twyla Tharp’s stunning Eighties sneaker ballet, In the Upper Room.To see the Cranko is such a rare thing that it enhances the experience of it - but my joy, I fear, was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The show's curator Jane Pritchard revealed this wonderful kitchen story in a unique walk-round with theartsdesk this week. Her two-year hunt ranged from Diaghilev's passport to glorious Nijinsky costumes, from the Ballets Russes accounts book to astonishing Picasso stage cloths, from precious notated scores by Stravinsky to automated Constructivist art, from ballerinas' slippers and early colour film to Yves St Laurent fashions. There is even a remarkable case containing original manuscripts and typescripts of James Joyce's Ulysses and Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and T S Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Quietly, without pomp and fanfare, Ashley Page has been mustering a balletic strike force over the border in Scotland. Scottish Ballet has launched the new ballet year with a programme that trumps anything else offered in Britain as a season opener, two demanding and brilliant works of the past (well done) and the gamble of a new creation of dance, music and design.Compared with the opening offerings of English National Ballet and the Royal Ballet - and even with the lively Birmingham Royal Ballet opening programme (of which more tomorrow) - this combination of Ashton’s miraculously stylish Read more ...
judith.flanders
Museum shows don’t often evoke a sense of smell, but without even trying, this Ballets Russes exhibition has visitors’ nostrils flared. The show is – intentionally – a feast for the eye, and even for the ear, with ballet scores (sometimes rudely overlapping) playing in every room. But smell?True, Diaghilev was said to have worn Mitsouko perfume, and sure enough, a flacon sits in one of the galleries. But more to the point, look carefully at the costumes. The first response is – how incredibly gorgeous. Heavy with embroidery, with appliqué, with silk, with satin, velvets, lace, gilt wire, even Read more ...
theartsdesk
After Monday's report on the Royal Opera House’s new contract demands, a young composer alerted theartsdesk to an intriguing offer on the Covent Garden website - to "Create" a soundtrack for dance. This is a competition for new talent which will be judged by a team led by Deborah Bull, the ROH’s Creative Director: the winning entries to be shown at the ROH in November as part of the FIRSTS 2010 festival.
Create invites any composer over the age of 12 to create a new piece of music to short films of excerpts of existing choreography by two of the ROH’s associates, Will Tuckett and Wayne Read more ...