Dance
Jenny Gilbert
Launching a four-year global project to proclaim the genius of Frederick Ashton might seem unnecessary. His work is the bedrock of what’s widely known as The English Style and rarely absent from any British ballet season, whether at the Royal Ballet (for whom he created much of it), or elsewhere.But the man was prolific, choreographing more than 100 works across half of the last century, and a large number of them deserve rediscovery. No matter that they were made in and for a very different world – a world of evening gloves and Margot Fonteyn and tea with the Queen Mother: today’s audiences Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Success in running a large and expanding dance-house enterprise requires knowing when to play safe and when to play with fire, trusting that your audience will come with you. Sadler’s Wells’ annual Flamenco Festival is now such an established feature of the dance calendar that you can usually guess what the opening show will be: a major company with ranks of befrilled backing dancers, a hefty squad of guitarists, box-thwackers and hand-clappers, and at least two or three raucous singers, not to mention the star bailaora and her attendant men. Not this year. This year the opening spot was Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If there is a more striking, more moving, more downright enjoyable way to experience Shakespeare’s second-from-last play, I have yet to see it. The Winter’s Tale, originally a “romance” in five acts, is widely regarded as a problem play, not only because of its lack of poetic blank verse or cheerful rhymed couplets, but because of its lurching narrative tone, the first three acts filled with bleak psychological drama, the last two comic and frothy. And then there are those challenging stage directions: a statue that mysteriously comes to life, a breathless chase across land and sea, and Read more ...
Justine Elias
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who search for long-unheard songs crave a certain melody that works a terrible magic on the living. In this pleasingly eldritch narrative debut by documentary-maker Paul Duane, it’s unclear whether the forbidden tune will turn out to be a love ballad, a curse, or both.Either way, the movie’s heroine, Anna (Simone Collins, pictured below), thrills at the thought of discovering for herself. Though she’s the talented frontwoman of a contemporary Irish folk group, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Triple bills can be a difficult sell for ballet companies. Audiences prefer big sets and costumes, and a storyline they can hum. It’s not hard to see why Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening hits Romeo and Juliet and Manon have turned out to be such a valuable legacy for his widow and daughter – companies around the world have an endless appetite for staging them.But MacMillan’s shorter pieces have challenged the art form in a greater variety of ways. They have arguably also done more to shape the collective identity of the company that he tried several times to escape but which repeatedly drew Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...