Dance
Jasper Rees
What is light entertainment for? It won’t save the world or heal the sick or bring warring factions to the negotiating table. It’s teeth and smiles and bread and circuses on a Saturday night and it shouldn’t have to bear any greater weight. The Generation Game was never required to offer vital balm during the Three-Day Week. Barrymore didn’t nurse us all through Black Wednesday and Britain’s exit from the ERM. And yet there have been times this autumn when the last line of defence between civilisation and the abyss has been a fat failed politician called Balls making a glorious tit of himself Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Anyone expecting a knockout punch from Matthew Bourne’s latest creation is in for a let-down. His hotly anticipated take on Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film, unlike his Swan Lake, is not going to send anyone out into the night weeping into their hankie. Nor is it likely to turn unbelievers into ballet fans, and yet it is probably his best piece of work to date.The culmination of a long-held ambition, it truly is, in the luvvie phrase, a love letter to a life in the theatre, to dance in particular, and obliquely, to cinema too. A story about devotion to an artform, The Red Shoes feels like a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Booking a ticket for a show devised by Michael Keegan-Dolan has always required an act of faith, and this is no exception. ‘If I say this is a house, it’s a house,” says the evening’s laconic compere, Mikel Murfi, gesturing with his cigarette to three breeze blocks on the floor. And if Keegan-Dolan says this is Swan Lake you’d better believe it and brace yourself for wrenching tragedy.Keegan-Dolan has form. He brought London audiences the most striking take on The Rite of Spring in living memory as well as a compelling revision of Giselle which cast the title character as an Irish line- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An inviting gap in the market, a dark, mysterious place, was left beckoning when the dance theatres of Britain cashed in on expensive refurbs in the name of public accessibility. Putting an end to mystique, they homed in on IKEA style, all glass, pale wood and airport foyer briskness. The theatre as a continuum with our office space, blank, unprejudicing, unintoxicating, all about efficiency and the bottom line.When I was an usherette at Covent Garden, huddled cloakrooms and elvish bars could be found around every corner, each a tiny fierce kingdom ruled by an outsize ego – Irish Paddy in one Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas - in the shape of Peter Wright's Nutcracker - has arrived earlier than usual at the Royal Opera House. This is to make space for a 70th anniversary run of The Sleeping Beauty that starts on 21 December: the two will run in tandem through the holiday period, scheduling that assumes audiences can't get enough of Tchaikovsky-and-tutus at Christmas. And I'm sure they can't, when the purveyors of said delights are the Royal Ballet.It helps that Wright's Nutcracker is a classic of the genre, almost perfect in every way. I say almost, because I began to feel, on last night's viewing, that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Thank God for Akram Khan, English National Ballet, and Tamara Rojo. Their new Giselle, which finally arrived at Sadler's Wells this week after its Salford premiere in September, is a work of intelligence, power, beauty, and - most gratifying of all in this age of lies, damned lies and politics - stunning integrity. This is a ballet about issues that matter, made by people who know what they're doing.Giselle, thematically much the richest of the 19th-century ballets, is a strong choice for a remake, with a tight two-act structure on which to hang the exploration of all sorts of interesting Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
"My mission is to create new dance with new music and new design that is intimately plugged in to the world we live in today. I am motivated to make contemporary work that speaks of now and that is totally present-tense," Wayne McGregor explains in the programme note for last night's triple bill of his works at the Royal Opera House. It's the McGregor-speak that we have all come to know: a vanishingly tiny message wrapped up in obfuscatory verbiage. I find it increasingly sad that McGregor seems to have become trapped in his own, over-thought, narrative: he has a questing spirit and a curious Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The reception of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Anastasia has some similarities with that accorded the Berlin asylum patient who some believed to be the lost Romanov Grand Duchess. For supporters who wanted to believe in the fairytale, Anna Anderson's awkwardness, her lack of Russian, her facial dissimilarity to the Tsar's youngest daughter, could all be turned to postive account; her unlikeness became evidence of likeness.In the case of the ballet, its supporters cite its flaws as evidence of its nobility; MacMillan should not be accused of failing, but lauded for having tried at all. The ballet Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Shakespeare has always been a fertile source of inspiration for story ballets. Plays which exist in multiple dance versions include Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, while Shakespeare sources have often moved choreographers to their best work: Ashton's Dream, MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, and Christopher Wheeldon's recent Winter's Tale for the Royal Ballet are all highlights of their respective creators' oeuvres. Birmingham Royal Ballet has done the obvious thing in this anniversary year by mounting several of these story ballets, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised – at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators. I suspect a combination of circumstances to be at work: the lower international profile of Australian Ballet relative to others who do cinema screenings, like the Royal Ballet or the Bolshoi; the multiplex location, where the culture on screen market is less developed than at arts cinemas which show plays/ballets/operas/exhibitions much more often; and perhaps also the fact that the Sleeping Beauty Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This is it. This is absolutely, definitely, finally Carlos Acosta's farewell to classical ballet. He has managed to spin out his retirement celebrations for almost a year: he gave his last performance on the Royal Opera House main stage last November, and there have already been two versions of the gala show which opened at the Royal Albert Hall last night, one at the Coliseum last autumn and a touring one during the spring and early summer of this year. But this – we believe – really is the last chance to see Acosta on stage in classical roles.It's some way to go out. The previous version of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In a world of terrifyingly serious news, the opening of the Royal Ballet season with Frederick Ashton's pastoral frolic La Fille mal gardée might seem like a wanton disregard for reality, like a brass band playing "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside" as the Titanic goes down. But that is to misunderstand the reason Fille is so beloved is that it has at its heart a perfectly serious and realistic topic: young love.The ballet's roots are in comédie sérieuse - meaning "true to life" - and it is true to life, in a rose-tinged, shiny photo album sort of way. Most young agricultural swains do Read more ...