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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The story of Edward Scissorhands may not seem an obvious Christmas subject, but it couldn’t be a more overt call for goodwill to all men. And there’s a hint of The Nutcracker about Matthew Bourne’s dance version, too.Created in 2005 and last seen in 2014, the piece is his Sadler’s Wells seasonal treat this year, and it’s more witty and beguiling than ever before, fine-tuned for today’s world, despite its age. The staple ingredients of the piece, adapted for New Adventures by Caroline Thompson from her screenplay for Tim Burton’s 1990 film, are the familiar ones: a sunny 1950s suburban Read more ...

Intimacy isn’t everything, but there’s nothing like seeing dance live and up close. A good seat in a large theatre will give you the whole stage picture but lose the detail. Lost too will be that quasi-visceral connection with the movement.A fascinating academic study found that the brains of people watching dance, presuming they are paying attention and not checking their phones, transmit messages to the appropriate muscles as if to prompt a sympathetic mirror dance. We don’t generally act on these messages (imagine the scenes if we did) but subliminally they are there, urging our emotional Read more ...

Singular in its variousness, this is a three-act ballet that need some unpicking. No wonder those hooked on first acquaintance in 2021, like theartsdesk’s dance critic Jenny Gilbert, have been back to see it more than once.So long as you accept that the interpretation by choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Thomas Adès and artist Tacita Dean of hell, purgatory and heaven isn’t always contingent with Dante’s and Virgil's descent through the ever-narrowing circles of the damned, up the magic mountain of Purgatory to the garden where Beatrice awaits, and then on in a rare celestial flight, you Read more ...

Imagine a world in which speech has a daily legal limit. Not a limit on what you say, but how many words it takes to say it. Now imagine how such a scenario might work as dance.Adaptations are so common on the theatre stage that the change of state often barely registers: films into plays, novels into ballets, novels into plays… The Limit is different. It takes a West End play, adds live music and choreography, replaces the two leading actors with dancers, and then has those two dancers speak the playscript.The title of the original play, by Sam Steiner, was memorable if unwieldy. Lemons Read more ...

Double bills at the ballet don’t often come as neatly gift-wrapped. Each of the works in question was made just before or during lockdown, arriving at its premiere by the skin of its teeth. Each went on to win a Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for best choreography.And each leans heavily on orchestral music – one a glorious swirl of Rachmaninov, the other a showreel of memories from a musical life: Elgar, Beethoven, Schubert, Fauré and more Rachmaninov. Placed side by side for the first time the two works fit as snugly as a pair of ballet slippers.The Cellist, choreographer Cathy Marston Read more ...

On the whole the Bible is not big on sex and sensuality, with the exception of one very short book in the Old Testament. The Song of Solomon – aka Song of Songs – is a hymn to carnal pleasure, one whose vivid descriptions of perfect flesh and brimming wine flagons have divided religious scholars for centuries.The New York-based choreographer Pam Tanowitz turned to the text when looking to deepen her understanding of her Jewish roots, and invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang to collaborate. It should surprise no one that their Song of Songs, which has just played at the Read more ...