Dance
Ismene Brown
A birthday offering, a wedding celebration - with that, and one further creative collaboration ahead, Dame Monica Mason makes her farewell as director of the Royal Ballet after 10 years. The last programme of favourites from the store cupboard must always be a tricky one, but true to form the mistress of the great occasion (anniversaries have been a mainstay of her programming) picked rituals and ceremonies that stressed company ethos and values.Those 10 years of her reign have been steady, stable, conservative - mostly restricted in programming to the box-office comfort zone; and while the Read more ...
james.woodall
It opens with a siren saying she’s got cramp. She’s glad she’s got cramp because she can stay outside and enjoy the sky. It closes with people blowing water at each other, glugged from plastic bottles. In between nothing happens.Well, that’s not quite true. One woman strokes her beautiful brown legs with a brush. Another lies down and says - as, so often in Bausch, in irritating English - “Don’t pass the line” (actually it should be “cross”). Two men chuck a spear between them. The cast loll around in beach gear with cocktail languor. There are dozens of other moments of utter Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of apparatchiks in your name and mine to compel artists and small businesses not to infringe their entirely dubious copyright in the Olympic motto. David Bintley came out much the better of a last-minute squabble a fortnight ago about his new ballet’s name - he had to truncate it to Faster, from his original “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, so that LOCOG could keep Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new Sleeping Beauty from the iconoclastic dance showman Matthew Bourne headlines Sadler's Wells Theatre's new season. Climaxing a year of celebrating Bourne's engaging talent - his Play Without Words plays the Wells' summer, following a tour of early career highlights - this production offers a grown-up alternative to the record-breaking Christmas show The Snowman at the Peacock Theatre once again for the 15th year. San Francisco Ballet's visit in September with a generous season is another news-maker, and there's a return for Akram Khan's superb DESH, whose second run was postponed after Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The Guardian were the major winners with five awards, but even their new Data Store section was outgunned in the Specialist Journalism category by The Arts Desk.In a category contested by 11 nominees, The Arts Desk's prize was the first of two given by the judges acclaiming two specialist sites "for very different reasons" - the other went to The Economist Read more ...
Ismene Brown
John Percival, one of the heavyweight group of dance critics of the past 60 years, died last Wednesday, aged 85. He had watched and reported on ballet and dance from their infancy in the Forties right up to recent years, offering a powerful perspective on one of the most vivid and energetic movements in British culture in the 20th century.The first biographer of Rudolf Nureyev and choreographer John Cranko, Percival was for 30 years the dance critic of The Times and also the editor of Dance and Dancers, the now defunct but eminent monthly magazine that charted the growing maturity of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men. The smells of hookahs, roses and fish are part of the magic the city has from time immemorial radiated, beckoning traders and dealers, visitors and adventurers, to a place of shifting histories and irresistible mystery. All of which should make Nefés, Pina Bausch’s travelogue on Istanbul, one of the more substantial productions of her long series Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Premiered in 2007, Bamboo Blues was generated by a visit to Kolkata; and with the simplest of means, designer Peter Pabst conjures the vast landscapes of India. The first half unfolds against a backdrop of white muslin curtains rippling in the wind; the long hair and flowing dresses of the dancers are similarly activated by this elemental force, whose energy creates an ongoing sense of excitement and expectation (even though we know the air currents are generated by a wind machine).Later the curtains become a screen for footage of palm trees and dense forest; for scenes from the Read more ...
judith.flanders
It may be that designer Peter Pabst is the unsung hero of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s “World Cities” extravaganza. When the lights go down at Sadler’s Wells for Der Fensterputzer (The Window-washer), the stage is dominated by a vast mountain of glowing red flowers, over four metres high, nine metres across, looming out of a modernistic black-box stage. It is a moment of pure, surging drama.Hong Kong is the city Bausch is commemorating in this installation of her travelogue, her series of essays of places her company has been, cultures she has ingested. A smiling woman welcomes us – or perhaps a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Japanese dance public is overwhelmingly female, so it’s not surprising that Pina Bausch’s paean to Saitama, Ten Chi, is so girly. The fourth in the series of “World Cities” that’s sold out London’s two great dance centres, the Barbican and Sadler’s Wells, this late Bausch (2004) is pregnant with wish-fulfilment, gorgeous young men doing sexy things like watching while women bathe or disrobe, while a vast, muscular whale’s tail plunges erotically into the earth and soft plucking music washes through the darkness."Ten Chi" means, I understand, Heaven and Earth, and this is a safe escapist Read more ...