Dance
Ismene Brown
A house of contact, a place to make contact - this bare, evocative title sits on one of Pina Bausch’s most appealing works, and also its most elastic. Brought this week to the Barbican posthumously, staged by her company on two amateur casts, Kontakthof didn’t look 32 years old, it looked both timeless and as fresh as fledglings cracking out of their egg shells.In 1978 when this surreal and exact spinner of magical webs created the piece, the Berlin Wall was as impregnable as it had been for a generation and meetings carried less casual insignificance than today. Kontakthof then was danced by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the Cuban National Ballet’s Swan Lake fourth act, the corps of swans do a curious, aggressive attacking run you don’t see in any other production - they lower their heads and charge at Prince Siegfried, with hands fluttering angrily behind them, as if they were the evil magicians, not the creatures under a spell. There is a spell cast over the Cuban Ballet, a 60-year-old spell, which was once a force of astounding light and artistic release, but which is declining into depression.Alicia Alonso will be 90 this year, and the miracle-worker who gave birth to Cuba’s amazing incarnation as one Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Another night, another cast, another Judas Tree (see first-night review below this) - and yet more proof of what a tough, durable, shape-shifting piece Kenneth MacMillan created in his last year of life. Recently theartsdesk interviewee Thiago Soares talked of his preparations to play the central male in this gladiatorial ballet, and last night he made the role of the Foreman his own, taking to the stage like a razor-edged switchblade as the head of the gang of labourers who prowl at night through Canary Wharf and carry girls’ bodies to and fro.Theories about what The Judas Tree means range Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This week the world-renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch arrives in London - for the first time, without its towering creator. Last summer the German choreographer died at the age of 68. The company intends to continue, despite the dodgy track record for troupes formed around one singular giant vision to survive long without that magnet at the core. Bausch (1940-2009) was shy in person and had no need to publicise her work, but at Christmas 2001 I met her in her base in Wuppertal, and she looked back in detail over the surprising sources in her life for her innovative style of dance- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How does a ballerina feel during Swan Lake? Find out instantaneously from the New York ballerina who tweets while she dances. Ashley Bouder is one of the most exciting dancers of the new generation over there - and new-generation she is.According to Gia Kourlas’s article in the New York Times today, Ashley’s iPhone is her closest partner, and her constant twittering is opening up a new understanding of a leading dance-artist’s life. So what did the Swan Queen tweet the other day as she magically flew off the stage and prepared to change into the black tutu of her wicked doppelganger? “Odette Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Was it with a hollow laugh that ENB programmed Cinderella for the election period - as a reminder that glittery fairy phaetons are in fact pumpkins with money? Was it a hint that ballet needs political fairy godmothers? With airwaves full of budget cuts, nothing was more welcome yesterday than to go into a Bristol Hippodrome matinee, full of noisy children, and watch this delightful fairytale of wish-fulfilment laid before them. Even better, with the radiant Elena Glurdjidze as the ash girl.This version, made by Michael Corder for ENB in 1996 and now embarking on a UK tour, has the same Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Furthering their reputation as the least predictable prize-giving organisation out there, the Laurence Olivier Awards last night gave their top prizes to a host of productions that have long departed London, starting with Best Play for Tennessee-born writer Katori Hall's The Mountaintop. You were thinking Enron or (my personal best) Jerusalem? You'd be wrong.And so it went throughout an evening that dangled an odd carrot in the direction of some of the West End's reigning hits, giving Enron yet another directing trophy for Rupert Goold and Jerusalem the prizes for set design (Ultz's epic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In a constantly challenging output of ballets, the remarkable choreographer Kenneth MacMillan produced nothing more upsetting than his last, The Judas Tree. Baldly, it portrays gang-rape, double murder and suicide among a nasty bunch of men on a building site. Brian Elias’s music slashes and bashes frighteningly around the listener’s head; Jock McFadyen’s gritty Canary Wharf set is the epitome of everything sinister about building sites; and above all MacMillan’s choreography takes sexual confrontation to a pitch even he had never matched in the extremes of his uninhibited imagination.He said Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Jonathan Mills has announced the programme for Edinburgh International Festival 2010, on a theme of modern culture in the New Worlds of the Americas and Australasia. Ranging from California to Canberra, New York to New Zealand, from Santiago to Samoa, the festival opens on Friday 13 August with John Adams' oratorio El Niño and closes on Sunday 5 September with the traditional fireworks concert.World premieres include political writer Alistair Beaton’s exploration of Scotland’s futile attempt at establishing a colony in Panama, Caledonia, directed by Anthony Neilson and co-produced by the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With a title like that, and a slug across the posters that so boastingly prejudges last night's premiere, some of us might keep our sceptical specs on when we turn up at the spirits-lowering Peacock Theatre to see this latest leap by mainstream stage forces onto the bandwagon of the most exciting trend in dance of the past 15 years. Sheathe those sceptical specs. This is a show blazing with talent and young exuberance, and it will rejuvenate you faster than a Red Bull.An 80-year-old was sitting in front of me last night, his face split with an ear-to-ear grin, clapping hopelessly out of time Read more ...
james.woodall
One of the daily tragedies of being human is that notions in our heads of unaided flight, levitation - any thought of lift-off from our material horizon - lie in drastic disproportion to what flesh and muscle permit. As children, we dream of flying, or living, say, on ocean floors without gas-tanks. As adolescents, we dream of many things, most of them impossible. As adults, sportspeople and dancers strain to defy nature, but never do. Most of us go on to live resignedly alongside, or inside, nature, glum in the knowledge that our "machine", as Hamlet terms his mortal frame, will of course Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What should a choreographer set before a Prince for a Royal Gala performance when his finest hour is a portrayal of Royal buggery with a hot poker? Well, possibly (sotto voce) clogdancing cobblers and pegleg pirates might be found more suitable, and plenty of children on stage. So peglegs and clogdancing is what Prince Charles will duly be served tonight at the celebration of 20 years of Birmingham Royal Ballet. These are not times to be challenging any more.It's 20 years since Sadler’s Wells Ballet took on a breakneck challenge, handed in the keys to its historic home in Islington and got Read more ...