Dance
Ismene Brown
Victims driven to death by the mob, women and men violently rutting in animal costumes, a black comedy about a snatched baby, a naked man dancing alone in his own fantasy - many and varied are the images in the nearly 200 danceworks created to the notorious Rite of Spring since its premiere exactly a century ago. Nothing created in performance art in the 100 years since has had so decisive an aftermath as this seismic work. Nothing has liberated creators from rules quite as emphatically as the uncategorisable theatre piece put before shocked audiences in Paris and London in the late Read more ...
judith.flanders
If you want virtuosity, there’s only one place to be in London right now, and that’s watching the Mikhailovsky’s fine production of that demented old warhorse, Don Quixote, with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev in the leads.Don Quixote is one of the 19th-century’s pastiche pleasures, half-pantomime, half-burlesque, all razzmatazz. Choreographed by a Russian (actually, over time, six Russians), set in a Spain that never was, with music by an Austro-Hungarian, the last thing the ballet is is coherent. Instead one tiny episode from the original Cervantes novel, the story of a barber and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even visitors from distant galaxies will be aware that, when it comes to the arts, state munificence is not what it was. Cuts are biting deep into an industry which is not always able to provide facts and figures in support of its importance to national wellbeing. When public money runs dry, the only other source is private wealth. But even sponsors and benefactors are feeling the pinch these days, so a new initiative has been announced to address the problem by going directly to consumers of the arts.Donate was launched by the National Funding Scheme for the Arts and Heritage today. The idea Read more ...
judith.flanders
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual suspects. The last company anyone expected, however, was the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s junior company to its senior world-class sister, the Mariinsky.What drew them? Well, the company has an extraordinary Soviet heritage, playing host to some of the great names of 1930s experimental dance. It probably helps, too, that it is now funded by an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The annual Sadler’s Wells Flamenco Festival is a hidden treasure-house of brilliance, too quietly sneaking into London in the unappealing limbo between winter and spring, but surely one of the great global gatherings of the dazzling individualists in this mysterious dance form. Flamenco ranges from the red-top populists like the ebullient exhibitionist Farruquito to the wilfully innovative Israel Galván, who lit up two Sunday nights in a row which both brought the house to their feet in ovations.Israel Galván’s the real galvaniser. Half a silent-movie comedian, half a mesmerising midnight Read more ...
natalie.wheen
Quite simply, the performance was one of those rarest of events in the theatre that will be talked about for generations - the Russian premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, with the former Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin making his debut as Crown Prince Rudolf.This has been a "must-see" evening since the minute it was announced by Moscow's Stanislavsky Ballet not only with Polunin now having rock-star status in Russia, but also for MacMillan’s choreography which is not found in any other Russian theatre. Extra chairs were put in, people were even sitting in the aisles. The full run Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
“Possibly the least ‘deep’ ballet I’ve ever made” - these are the words that David Bintley uses to describe his latest full-length work Aladdin, and they make rather a discouraging start to any evening. "Light" isn’t necessarily bad – work created in such a manner can often end up communicating something deeper come their unveiling.Aladdin has been a long time coming, with the composer Carl Davis initially mentioning it to Bintley in 2006. The work was eventually created for the National Ballet of Japan in 2008, another reason (according to Bintley) for any obvious weaknesses the production Read more ...
judith.flanders
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Franz Kafka gives birth to a startling hallucinogenic premise. And Arthur Pita’s very clever dance drama produces something of a similar jolt in its precision and strangeness.Simon Daw’s sparely elegant set presents the two halves of the Samsa household – on one side Gregor’s clinical white bedroom, looking like the “before” picture in a German Expressionist film of an insane asylum; on the other, the Samsas’ kitchen Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is the Bolshoi Ballet going to have trouble selling its tickets for its London tour as a result of the acid attack on its artistic director Sergei Filin? A range of opinion is erupting among ballet-goers dismayed not only by the attack but by the exposure of vicious infighting inside the Moscow troupe and the subsequent public developments.Filin's key opponent inside the company, the leading dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze, has been billed to come over on the tour - he has so far expressed no sympathy for Filin's plight, while denying having anything to do with the attack, for which a Bolshoi Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
Art is a fickle subject – hence why many preeminent philosophers offer different theories as to how we can begin to understand the opposing effect the same object or creation can have on different people. Many can be mildly affected by a given entity, but occasionally something bigger can happen – some might say a revelation of sorts. And such a thing took place for me at the Royal Opera House yesterday evening.The Royal Ballet opened their third run of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to a packed and receptive audience, including me – somewhat to my surprise Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Ballet's 2013-14 season will open with Carlos Acosta's much-anticipated production of the virtuoso comic 19th-century ballet Don Quixote, the first of a traditional classical-looking year with modest openings for new work. Prime among those will be a cheeringly ambitious full-length story-ballet by Christopher Wheeldon based on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a plot whose themes of jealousy in marriage and the abandonment of a child promise to push the generally abstract choreographer into a new dimension.The company's talented young junior Liam Scarlett also develops his skills at Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Sadler's Wells 10th Flamenco Festival opens tomorrow night with thudding heels, swirling skirts and wailing voices, some will sit there begging to know what the wailing is about. Dancers like Eva Yerbabuena and Israel Galván, singers like Estrella Morente, reach us deep in some inexpressible place with their performance, but their passion is driven by the evocative poetry of a powerful oral tradition going back some three centuries.Concise, marvellously economical in rhythm and rhyme, flamenco lyrics are usually as intense as they sound, odes to sexual passion, death and a life on the Read more ...