Dance
judith.flanders
The Bolshoi’s summer season in London has so far been straight-down-the-line trad: Swan Lake as an opener, Bayadère, Sleeping Beauty. Now, however, with Balanchine’s Jewels, they’ve at least dipped a pointe shoe into the 20th century, if rather cautiously.Jewels is, to be blunt, a beast of a ballet to get right – or, to change metaphor, it is a will o’ the wisp, ambiguous in style, constantly shape-shifting before our eyes. To get to grips with it, from either side of the footlights, is not simple, and neither the company (who acquired this work only last year) nor the audience was entirely Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi Theatre reopened in late autumn 2011 after a problematic six-year refurbishment said to have cost a tidy billion dollars, many times its original estimate thanks to corruption - it needed a corker of a ballet premiere to pop the eyes of a cynical Russian public, and it set upon a new staging of The Sleeping Beauty. This was also problematic, as three years earlier it had been promised to the then ballet director Alexei Ratmansky, who had soon afterwards resigned his job, wretched and miserable with the corrosive relationships within the theatre. And it was reassigned to the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s unspeakably bad for so many reasons that the injured Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin cannot be in London to see his company perform, and one is that he can’t see his protegée Olga Smirnova revealing herself to us as destined to be one of the great ballerinas of this era. Smirnova was signed in 2011 by Filin from the Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg, the Mariinsky’s nursery, whose combination of regal style and gossamer delicacy is evident through every fibre of this miraculous young dancer’s movement.In La Bayadère last night she showed herself not only to possess as if by nature Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The mighty adorable Carlos Acosta is at the London Coliseum this week in all his might and all his adorableness - four times, you may like to know, he appears without his shirt on. This is relevant, because it’s not the preening bare-chestedness of a showbiz egomaniac like some I could name, it demonstrates the desire of a man to shed trappings, to be himself at his most unadorned, adorning the art he loves: classical ballet.Acosta likes to do a summer show for London, though not necessarily directly against the Bolshoi Ballet residency. However, this has great appeal, being a gallery of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Everyone must be wishing the Bolshoi Ballet a swift return to company health after the tragic events of this year, as well as a return to physical health by their horribly injured artistic director - in the circumstances it’s heroic that they have got to London at all, let alone in such good performing order as they showed last night. Many of us will be wishing they had got themselves a worthy production of Swan Lake too, but they haven’t, and so the first night of their three-week visit to Covent Garden was not the glowing triumph it should be in the film script.Those Russian women have a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A magical folktale, a male duet, a classical jewel-box - programmes like this should be a rich part of the warp and weft of a ballet company, a night of rich interest and variety, stimulating dancers with challenges to their grace and storytelling skills. That it comes as the briefest glimpse in English National Ballet’s year is truly a pity, especially as it pays tribute to that superlative catalyst in ballet, Rudolf Nureyev.As a legend he almost instinctively attracts the adjective “blinding”, so impossible an act to follow was he as a stage creature, particularly for the men - but in fact Read more ...
Jasper Rees
JThis year’s Proms have been accompanied by an unusual choral drone, a monotony of voices whinging about the prodigious heat at the Albert Hall. For one night only no one was complaining as the temperature gauge went up to something like 111. You’ve heard of the Hollywood Prom and Comedy Prom, the Gospel Prom and the Dalek Prom. As a troupe of classical Spanish dancers swished and swirled, stomped, strutted and thrust to pulsating Hispanic music, here was something never before seen: the Erotica Prom.Technically it’s Wagner week, with the bicentenary being celebrated night after night for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Are we seeing a breakdown in the ballet company system? Where the brightest stars used to twinkle in the great companies, all is changing. Alina Cojocaru, the great Royal Ballet ballerina, has announced today she's joining English National Ballet - run by another great Royal Ballet ballerina, Tamara Rojo. For ENB to have the two finest talents of the past decade in Covent Garden now at the head of their cast lists is the biggest stunner since… well, since the Bolshoi Ballet's young superstars Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev quit to join the smaller Mikhailovsky Ballet.Or since the Royal's Read more ...
David Nice
Happy truisms first: Paco Peña is still the greatest of flamenco guitarists, he works with a consummate team of regulars in the most vibrant of dance-art and he keeps it fresh by scouring the world for different players or ensembles to complement his own flamencistas. I’ll never forget equal artists Venezuelan Diego Alvarez, creating miracles from the simple plywood box with vibrating strings known as the cajón, and on this occasion the breathtaking Senegalese dancer Alboury Dabo. Contexts, though, bring the compromising dangers of fusion, and Quimeras has more than a few obstacles to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When a person is happy in his work, he does his best. So best ignore what Sergei Polunin says on the page of a newspaper and look at what he does on stage. Now there’s a happy boy. Polunin is the one reason to see the Stanislavsky Ballet at the Coliseum on this short visit, though it's always a pleasure to hear Delibes’s divine score to which Roland Petit created a short, pert, thin and very French version of Coppélia, chockful with kisses.A fairground organ wheezes out Swanilda’s lilting waltz, and the curtains part on a pleasing pale grey marble courtyard. It is a weird story, under Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Just a fortnight before Russia's great Bolshoi Ballet lands in London for its splendid summer tour, it has now added a lost chief executive to its tally of a blinded ballet director, an arrested dancer, and a sacked star.The Russian press reports that today its general director for 13 years, Anatoly Iksanov (picture below, Izvestia), has resigned and will be replaced by the veteran chief of the neighbouring, but smaller, Moscow company, the Stanislavsky Theatre. It caps a horrendous six months, but may well signal a new determination by the Russian government to sort out the mayhem.Iksanov’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
A stage performance in any art form communicates through sound and motion. A photographer's task is to capture the dramatic experience in the silence and stillness of the 2D image. In the worlds of ballet and opera, none does it with more commitment to truth and drama than the great Laurie Lewis. To mark the end of the 2012-13 season, we present 25 images selected by the photographer exclusively for theartsdesk. They comprise a snapshot of the last nine months of work witnessed by audiences at the Royal Opera House, Sadler's Wells, the London Coliseum, the Barbican and beyond. There's even Read more ...