Dance
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Ballet’s choice of season opener could be dismissed as safe and predictable. But as the glorious naturalistic detail of 1830s Paris unfolds in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 retelling, you see the reasoning. It’s only a year since the Royal Opera House remodelled its ground floor spaces to be more welcoming, and Manon is the ideal first-time ballet. It has everything – glamour, history, a fast-moving love story crackling with illicit sex, crime and social injustice. And it has MacMillan’s choreography, the like of which – in terms of examining the human heart in all its waywardness – Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There was a time when hip hop in a theatre was all about showing off. It was about dancers spinning on their head or their elbow so fast and for so long that the audience gaped in disbelief. Although it had long ago migrated from the concrete stairwells of inner city estates, the culture remained rooted in the idea of a battle, a dance-off, a show of virtuosity.Then along came Kenrick Sandy and Michael Asante, whose work with their company Boy Blue inched towards the territory of psychodrama. The hip hop movement is still there – the locking and popping, the smooth-as-silk floor work – but Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Ailey company is that rare thing – a dance legend that’s even better than you remember. While no one forgets their first encounter with America’s No.1 touring troupe and its unique mix of ballet, modern, jazz, street, and all-round athletic fabulousness, repeat viewings only increase one’s respect. The opening night of Programme C at Sadler’s Wells notched up my own 13th exposure to Revelations, the company’s barn-storming calling card inspired by Ailey’s early experience of segregated rural Texas. And it’s still fresh. Try as I might to spot a pasted-on smile in “Rocka My Soul”, there Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is no equivalent of the Ailey phenomenon. This is a modern dance company with a New York square named after it. It’s a dance company that has performed at the inauguration of two presidents. Its calling card, Revelations, a suite of dances first performed in 1960, is the most-watched modern dance work anywhere, ever.And how could it not be, when the Ailey bills it as a closer at every show? No matter which of three programmes you book to see at Sadler’s Wells, you will get the signature sign-off. It’s half an hour and a bit of kinetic joy drawing on Ailey’s memories of the Baptist Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Your first thought on hearing there's a new Matthew Bourne Romeo and Juliet might well be 'doesn't it exist already?' So obvious does this marriage of high drama, lush iconic score, and Britain's premier dance maker seem that you might well be forgiven for assuming it had happened years ago. In fact, the show Bourne presented at Sadler's Wells this week is brand new this year. So is it a worthy addition to the choreographer's stable of reimagined ballets? Up to a point. It won't knock the immortal male swans off the top spot, but it's still a hell of a night at the theatre.The familiar Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Why is Alexei Ratmansky one of the greatest living choreographers of classical ballet? Well partly because, as last night's performance of The Bright Stream by the Bolshoi at the Royal Opera House proved, he can do comedy. To adapt the famous aphorism for ballet: sententious abstract dance is easy, even Swan Lake is comparatively easy, but doing physical comedy well enough to raise belly laughs from a very smart, high-culture crowd is hard, hard, hard. Ashton could do it; Robbins could do it; and The Bright Stream puts Ratmansky in their distinguished company.Somewhat suprisingly, The Bright Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Bolshoi juggernaut has rolled into town and will be dominating the thoughts of ballet fans in and around the capital for the next three weeks. And what could be more dominating - or more quintessentially Bolshoi - than Yuri Grigorovitch's 1968 Spartacus? From the moment the curtain rises on the Roman soldiers' muscular, triumphant caperings in front of their captured slaves, you know that subtlety is not the aim in this story of freedom fighters versus decadent imperialism.Despite the many 'monologues', solos for the main characters to express their feelings, there is little of authentic Read more ...
Kitty Finstad
What does one wear to watch a Fashion Freak Show, FFS? On the eve of London’s hottest day probably ever, the fashion faithful still turned out in sequins, PVC jackets, knee-high lace-up boots, turbans, wigs and floral headpieces, a skin-tight silver jumpsuit, full drag and even a white beret courtesy of Mr Nile Rodgers, who must have been blushing every time his disco anthem “Le Freak C’est Chic" erupted from the speakers. Such is the influence of fashion’s favourite bad boy (don’t make me say enfant terrible…) that not to make an effort for the UK premiere at the Southbank Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Crowned queen of the percussive heel and the trouser suit, Sara Baras has the audience on its feet long before the final number of her show Sombras (Shadows). The Spanish superstar is a familiar presence at Sadler’s Wells, having fronted its annual two-week flamenco festival several times before. She’s a natural headliner with her big, glossy theatrics. Her current offering, though, is a thing of deep contrasts: light and dark, sound and silence, conviviality and yes, loneliness. There are moments when she almost has you believe it’s just you and her in the room.Baras’s signature dance over Read more ...
Owen Richards
Mari is one part kitchen sink drama, one part dance performance, bringing a refreshing take on bereavement and family. Dancer Charlotte joins her mother and sister at her dying grandmother’s bedside, and tensions rise as cabin fever sets in.Director Georgia Parris clearly understands how to film dance. The camera sways through rehearsals as bodies writhe in a cacophony of shapes. It’s hypnotic filmmaking, reaching crescendo in a dream sequence full of stark imagery. Her previous short films have focused on dancers, and this experience shows.Much of the film, though, is spent away from the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The publicity said it would be dark. But who would have guessed The Mother would be this dark? With its tally of dead and dying babies, gouged eye sockets and flayed skin, Arthur Pita’s latest dance-drama vehicle for the phenomenal Natalia Osipova, loosely based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, gives HBO’s Chernobyl a run for its money.Even Yann Seabra’s set – a revolving suite of poorly furnished rooms, all dingy wallpaper and stained sanitary ware – seems to have come from the same job lot. Russian folk memory seeps from every blood-smeared pore of this grisly tale with its cast of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It might seem odd to laud the entrances and exits of a ballet, but when it comes to stagecraft Christopher Wheeldon is second to none. You lose count of the ingenious ways he finds to shift up to 130 dancers in and out of view at the Albert Hall. Wheeldon created his three-act Cinderella in 2012 for a conventional stage, but for English National Ballet he has reworked it for this vast, non-theatrical O. For once, the wheels of Cinders’ carriage have space to roll.The down side is that the narrative feels overstretched and thin in spite of the pyrotechnics that have been thrown at it – massive Read more ...