Dance
Ismene Brown
Clowns are supposed to be chubby, grinning, funny, with anarchic hair and big red noses, like Coco. Or they are Chaplin-types, oppressed little city folk mutely combating the vast machines of the working life. They are not generally shaven-headed skinny men and women with beaky noses, starved cheekbones, and a way of life so severely monastic that it would drive you or me stark staring mad.But then Derevo are not ordinary clowns. If you have seen either of this Russian company’s two productions that have visited London and Edinburgh in recent years you will know this. The Red Zone was an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At this time of year people who love ballet divide into two tribes: those who are too sophisticated for The Nutcracker and those who will never been too sophisticated for The Nutcracker. The former will say that The Nutcracker is a children’s ballet. For the latter, Christmas would not be Christmas without hearing probably the most familiar and adored of Tchaikovsky’s music scores.One man has the means to both persuade the doubters and satiate the faithful - Sir Peter Wright, the creator of two great productions of The Nutcracker that this Christmas will be vying to brand the ballet’s magical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
THE choreographer George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, aged 79, of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare, if nowadays notorious, condition only discovered at his autopsy. What had been recognised long before his death, though, was that this man was one of the very greatest geniuses of the 20th century, a figure to be reckoned alongside Pablo Picasso in art and Igor Stravinsky in music.What he did for ballet was nothing less than complete reinvention, applying his mind energetically for almost 60 years to turning the conventional art he had learned in St Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theatre Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sir Frederick Ashton, Britain's unrivalled genius at creating ballets, had a simple attitude towards posterity. "You've heard his famous remark, 'Fuck posterity'?" says his nephew, Anthony Russell-Roberts, smiling but eyeing me apprehensively.Ashton's attitude to posterity has not at all pleased a hefty section of his admirers who, since his death in 1988, have consistently accused Russell-Roberts and the Royal Ballet (where he is administrative director) of neglecting Ashton's work. People for whom Ashton was, as the critic P W Manchester remarked, "our youth, and our growing up, and our Read more ...
Ismene Brown
SHE was the most chic Sixties doll that ever walked the streets, and all Britain enumerated her qualities when Peter Sarstedt's haunting pop-song hit the charts in 1969. "You talk like Marlene Dietrich, And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire. Your clothes are all made by Balmain, And there's diamonds and pearls in your hair. But where do you go to, my lovely?..."In such a song, Margot Fonteyn would not have been a groovy reference. Zizi Jeanmaire was another matter. Not for her the pale suffering virgin; she was a ballerina the liberated chick could go for. Wearing a corset as black and short as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Wayne Eagling was famous for many things in his 25-year career at the Royal Ballet - not least for his rich girlfriends. There was Isabel Goldsmith, daughter of the late Sir James; there was Francesca Thyssen, with whom he lived for five years. "Who's now the Archduchess of Austria... Yes," he says, with a note of surprise in his voice, "I could ask myself, why aren't I retired in luxury, sitting in Saint Tropez right now?" Instead of sitting in Amsterdam where he has no social life whatever.Probably because Eagling was not a man for a comfortable life - which was why the Royal Ballet sacked Read more ...
Ismene Brown
One of the first, scathing reviews of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Manon in 1974 nailed it exactly: "It is an appalling waste of lovely Antoinette Sibley who, as Manon, is reduced to a nasty little diamond-digger." In that sentence all the prevailing attitudes about ballet were summed up - the status of classical ballerinas as princesses on pedestals, the duty of ballet to polish their virtuous crowns, the horror of seeing this porcelain beauty smashed.That review, by the way, appeared not in The Lady but in the Communist daily, The Morning Star. But it was not the only slammer - for Manon, it Read more ...