Dance
Ismene Brown
Thank you, Romania, for ballerina Alina Cojocaru, pianist Dinu Lipatti, sopranos Angela Gheorghiu and Ileana Cotrubas, sculptor Constantin Brancusi, tennis player Ilie Nastase, playwright Eugène Ionesco, conductor Sergiu Celibidache, actors Edward G Robinson and Johnny Weissmuller among other Romanians who have added so much artistry and entertainment to modern life.Which came strongly to mind at Cojocaru’s Sadler’s Wells gala in aid of her charity supporting hospices for the terminally ill in her native land (as she explained to me in our interview last week). Romania has become a trigger Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For the Royal Ballet's exquisite star Alina Cojocaru her dream is performing some of the most physically demanding movements ever devised for a human being - for a paralysed 52-year-old man in Romania, the dream is to go to the park and look at the sky. Cojocaru's dream is realisable; Marius's is not. Romania is not a country where you would want to be ill, says the ballerina of her native land.This Sunday Cojocaru returns some of the value of her talent and position in the world to her homeland by hosting a ballet gala at Sadler's Wells Theatre to raise money for the Romanian Hospices of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I was trying to remember the last time a choreographer actually tried to make the audience smile in the past few months. Dance-lovers are suckers for guilt. They creep into the dark of their seat to be regaled by their share of the blame for the world’s wrongs, and creep home chastened, if not fully corrected (Rosas, Kylián, Schaufuss). Or else they are beaten about the head with the choreographer’s own personal shtick (Bausch, MacMillan, Petit). I know which I prefer.No venue is more a secular church for expiation than Sadler’s Wells, London's dance theatre. Last week it hosted two of the Read more ...