Dance
Jenny Gilbert
The story of Carmen is catnip to choreographers. No matter how many times this 180-year-old narrative has been tweaked and reframed in art, theatre, opera, dance and film, they keep coming back for more – which is curious when you consider that Carmen began life in a saucy French novella read in smoking rooms and gentlemen’s clubs.If it was fear of low-life women and racial contamination that made her provocative in the late 19th century, that hardly explains the persistence of Carmen into the 21st, nor the fact that two different full-evening dance versions are being presented at Sadler’s Read more ...
David Nice
In what feels like the beginning, or at least the Old Testament, there was Riverdance. Now, ready to flow through the world once the world knows it needs it, there’s a rainbow-coloured river of just about everything musical and choreographic that’s found its place in contemporary Ireland, performed with a pulsating energy as well as a poetry that stops you wondering too much about all the connections.Such is WAKE, created by pioneering company THISISPOPBABY's Jennifer Jennings, the polymathic Philip McMahon and Niall Sweeney with a score by Alma Kelliher, who sings superbly throughout. Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In uncertain times like these, the single thing that every flagship ballet company needs is a convincing iteration of a 19th-century blockbuster. New works are all very well and necessary, but they don’t have the pulling power of Swan Lake, or the staying power. The Royal Ballet’s previous production served the company well for three decades, more than justifying the original investment.Happily for the ballet-going public (which includes in large part the foreign visitors that Jeremy Hunt is suddenly so keen to impress), the Royal's punt on a 30-year-old choreographer, Liam Scarlett, in Read more ...
Paco Peña
There are moments that forever remain imprinted in our consciousness, engraved on the general map of our lives. I cannot forget the excitement of seeing snow for the first time in Córdoba, aged three or four, rushing to walk on it only to slip straight away and fall on my behind! Or when I discovered the sea, in Cádiz.Nor do I forget the tense moments, such as when my mother left the house every day before dawn to go to the wholesale market with empty pockets, to start the daily adventure of acquiring vegetables, on credit, which she would then sell on her stall in order to settle with the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s tempting to see the second gala created by Ukrainian-born Ivan Putrov as a reflection of the shift in Ukraine’s fortunes since his first one in March 2022. Somehow, just weeks after Ukraine was invaded, Putrov and his fellow student in Kyiv, Alina Cojocaru, brought the world’s finest principals to the London Coliseum for a show-stopping gala that was as moving as it was finely executed.Now Ukraine languishes for lack of munitions, its hard-won gains in the balance again, and Putrov has had to rally support for his second gala – which funds young arts students in Ukraine – in a fraught Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Perhaps the most memorable of the stage designs Peter Pabst created for Pina Bausch is back in London after nearly 20 years: a sea of erect pink silk carnations, the Nelken of the title. It’s canonical that there are 8,000 of them, but only the backstage team know the truth of that. As the piece opens, dancers start to appear in formal attire, carrying chairs, picking their way through the flowers and sitting down in silence, expectantly. Then Richard Tauber sings Franz Léhar’s “Schön ist die Welt” (The world is beautiful). Over the next two hours the piece will turn that idea into a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The word “immersive” is overused. When an immersive experience can be anything from a foreign language course to a trip down the Amazon on a headset, what might immersive dance involve? Not watching from a plush-covered seat, probably, and the dance not happening on a stage.The Canadian choreographer Robert Binet has thought hard about how to effect greater proximity of dancer and spectator, short of the performers sitting in our laps. His project Dark With Excessive Bright, opening the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New Choreography, is a hugely imaginative, at times thrilling, attempt to bridge Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of carnival and joy in a tragic trumpet solo – a composer who makes you think “Italy” in every phrase. Yet, in the dance adaptation that has just premiered at Sadler’s Wells, that strangest of road movies seems increasingly untranslatable.Not that the show doesn’t contain many pleasingly fluid sequences of dance, which sometimes soar. Choreographer Natalia Read more ...
Sean Gandini
I am a juggler. My wife Kati Ylä-Hokkala is also a juggler. Our life for the last three decades has been juggling. We have been fortunate to be practising this art form at a time when mathematical and creative developments meant that our vocabulary went from about 30 patterns to thousands. The Golden Age of juggling.In 2010 our lovely patron Angus MacKechnie asked us to put together a new piece for the outdoor space outside London's National Theatre. The late great Pina Bausch had just died and we decided to make a one-off tribute to her. We made a piece called Smashed. I had been intrigued Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s 50 years since the first, damning reviews of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Manon declared it to be too long and lumbered with terrible music. One of them also said that the title role was an appalling waste of the ballerina who, in the title role, was reduced to “a nasty little diamond-digger”.Roll on half a century and that teenage seductress is up there with Juliet, Giselle, Aurora and Odette-Odile – the most coveted as well as the most technically challenging roles in the canon – while the ballet has become a global money-spinner. A fast-moving love story set in an early 18th century Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
We’re used to the idea of 19th century ballets being updated, but the Giselle currently presented by English National Ballet takes it the other way.This production, itself more than 50 years old, offers the closest possible experience of a Romantic ballet as it might have been in the mid-1800s – minus the gas lighting and noisy stage machinery. It’s as if a thick layer of dust has been blown from an old, foxed etching, revealing its delicate lines and textures, heightening its emotional force.The specialness of Mary Skeaping’s production – the culmination of a lifetime’s research – drew Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Dance lovers have had a better time of it this year as the performance sector starts to find its feet again. In the wake of a general cull of independent dance companies, 2023 has seen signs of fresh growth.Lively enterprises have sprouted in unlikely places – a pop-up jazz club at the back of the Royal Festival Hall (Drew McOnie’s Nutcracker), a community hall wedged between Canary Wharf high-rises (Ballet Nights). There have been dance adaptations of texts ancient and modern: Pam Tanowitz’s gorgeous Song of Songs at the Barbican, on the one hand; on the other, The Limit, a kinetic take on a Read more ...