Dance
The Unknown Soldier, Infra, Symphony in C, Royal Ballet, review - WWI ballet honours obscure tragedy
Jenny Gilbert
Pity fatigue is a risk for any artwork marking the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. There can’t have been a man or woman in the Royal Opera House on Tuesday night who hadn’t already read, watched, or otherwise had their fill of the horrors of the Western Front and the never-ending debate over the futility of it all. So a 30-minute ballet, coming nine days after the Cenotaph solemnities and commissioned by the Royal Ballet, inevitably felt like an unrequested encore.The Unknown Soldier, a collaboration between choreographer Alastair Marriott, designer Es Devlin and composer Dario Marianelli Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Forty years on from its beginnings as part of New York's gay lib movement, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is playing to a global, largely straight audience. As the company launches a major UK tour, starting this week at the Peacock Theatre in London, its director of 28 years analyses its longevity.JENNY GILBERT: So, Tory, the company has been going since 1974. How is it still possible, given the greater acceptance of gender fluidity, to make comedy from men impersonating women?TORY DOBRIN: I don’t like the word formula, but it’s true that we’ve found a thing that works and we’ve stuck Read more ...
David Nice
"They incessantly break down, destroy and fragment the mistrust that exists among people," wrote a Latvian journalist of a folklore group during the start of the Baltic countries' "singing revolution" against Soviet rule in 1988. This is the recent reality, a nonviolent uprising unique in history, behind the daunting facts and figures of Latvia's latest "Song and Dance Celebration". In 65 events over a week in Riga, having rehearsed for five years, 16,500 singers from 427 choirs and 18,174 dancers from 739 groups - including those in the post-war Latvian diaspora around the world - perform to Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When Tamara Rojo won the top job at English National Ballet in 2012, it looked like a poisoned chalice. Directors had come and gone, some of them with visionary ideas, but all were defeated by the company’s peculiar position as underdog to the company at Covent Garden. With a much lower public subsidy and an obligation to tour, ENB has had to overwork box-office certainties such as the annual Nutcracker to stay afloat. An even tougher inheritance for Rojo was the perception that the level of dancing – with some shining individual exceptions – wasn’t quite up to scratch. Well, it is now.Of all Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
A new Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet is a once-in-a-generation event. Liam Scarlett, choreographer of the production that opened this week, was a babe in arms when its predecessor was created by Anthony Dowell and Yolanda Sonnabend in 1987, and – given the evidently lavish investment in the new show – the Royal Opera House accountants at least will be hoping Scarlett is a pensioner before his interpretation is retired.No small pressure, then, on Scarlett and perhaps even more on designer John Macfarlane. Swan Lake is, famously, a malleable classic, whose main ingredients of lakeside, swans, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Everyone knows that Elizabeth I was a monarch of deep intelligence and sharp wit. Fewer know how good she was at the galliard. This was a virile, proud, demandingly athletic dance, usually performed by the men at courtly gatherings, and the fact that the Queen of England so enthusiastically flouted convention in this way says a lot about her.Will Tuckett’s Elizabeth - revived at the Barbican Theatre following its success at the Linbury Studio two years ago – deliberately avoids quoting the dances and music of the time, but homes in on that independence of spirit and zestful physicality. Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
You have to hand it to the Americans: they think big. Where the Royal Ballet or ENB might put on three or four new works in the course of a season – because commissions are wildly expensive and a box office risk – San Francisco Ballet has just presented a dozen in the space of two weeks. What’s more, the 12 invited choreographers – four of them Brits or British trained – were given virtually carte blanche to create whatever they liked.Whatever they liked – really? Presumably carte blanche didn’t mean they were free to present the dancers in the buff, but it did mean the stepsmiths weren’t Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Whatever you do in the next couple of days, be sure to grab a ticket for this wonderfully atmospheric production. A glorious fusion of athletic dance, creative visuals and intoxicating sound, the piece pays tribute to the island of Taiwan, named Formosa ("beautiful") by Portuguese sailors in the 16th century, and home to Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.It is a historic moment, since this is Lin Hwai-min’s final production as leader of the company he founded in 1973. When he steps down next year, he will leave behind an impressive legacy that has won him countless accolades and comparisons with Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There is a sense of loyalty from the Brighton audience awaiting Hofesh Shechter’s new work. They have seen his company here in 2009, for the Brighton Festival commission of The Art of Not Looking Back, and the infamous Political Mother premiered here for the Festival in 2010.There was a feeling that people were waiting to be wowed – and they were not disappointed. The piece opens with a person being shot against a dark wall, which then divides into two. Immediately my thoughts are drawn to the divisive Israel/Palestinian conflict, a theme which the Israeli-born choreographer has dabbled in Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you came to this programme knowing nothing about the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, you may have learned a few things. That he died, tragically and rather dramatically, of a massive heart attack during a first night performance of one his own ballets. That he was "interested" in sex and death, and frequently choreographed violent forms of both in his ballets. That in later life he had a wife and daughter whom he loved. And that he was quite a significant 20th-century choreographer – though this last you'll have picked up more from the fact that this programme was aired at prime culture Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
One day someone will come up with an algorithm for the perfectly balanced triple bill. Until then ballet directors will have to make do with hit or miss. The Royal Ballet’s latest three-part offering would appear to tick the boxes: something old, something new-ish, and something just for fun. Yet while the evening can’t be faulted on the quality of performance, the effect is less than the sum of its parts.The best comes first, with a first revival of Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian Tear, a work created two years ago for an all-male ensemble. As is often the case with this choreographer, nothing is Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
A new William Forsythe ballet is quite a coup for English National Ballet; the choreographer hasn't made a piece in Britain in 20 years. Premiered last night as part of ENB's Voices of America triple bill at Sadler's Wells, Forsythe's Playlist (Track 1, 2) makes a rousing finale to a punchy programme of contemporary ballet delivered with the style we've now come to expect from this classy, confident company.Playlist (Track 1,2) is bravura neo-classical ballet and it shows off the chops of ENB's superb crop of male soloists. Forsythe was convinced to make it after seeing the company perform Le Read more ...