Dance
Jenny Gilbert
So there’s this prince, see, and he’s not at all happy. For a start, he never got over losing a parent when he was a child. He’s at odds with the world, sick to death with royal protocol and convinced that no one understands him. Worse, having too much time on his hands, he suffers from delusions. Meet Prince Siegfried, who found his soulmate, and met his nemesis, on a moonlit night by a lake.It can’t be long before some ballet company mounts a Swan Lake with a bearded prince in a ginger wig, but it won’t be English National Ballet that does it. That company is too respectful of the memory of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Come the end of the year, the ritual glance over the shoulder, what we crave is celebration – this year of all years. "Look, we have come through!" is what we all want to hear from arts practitioners who took such a battering in the previous one.And it would be possible, just about, for this article to take that tone. The big ballet companies – paddling furiously beneath the surface – have for the most part kept up an impression of business as usual. There was ambition, if not wholesale success, in two big three-act creations in the first half of the year: Tamara Rojo’s Florence Nightingale- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Matthew Bourne is not the first choreographer to tinker with the story of The Sleeping Beauty and he won't be the last, such is the lure of Tchaikovsky's score and the potency of the plot.Good and evil, beauty and decrepitude, the suspended animation of adolescence – these are themes that will always invite a fresh spin. But Bourne’s version, now on its third season at Sadler’s Wells, signally fails to shed any new light on the archetypal tale of youth and hope triumphing over old grudges. The old ballet does this very well, some would say definitively. But by imposing an alien aesthetic on Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
At a time when every other theatre is offering an alternative Christmas show, what to make of the Royal Opera House’s first collaboration with Lost Dog, aka director-choreographer Ben Duke, who has come up with the most un-merry topic imaginable? Meet Medea, the vengeful sorceress of Greek myth, who butchered her brother, nobbled her ex’s new bride and murdered her own children. The Wind in the Willows this is not.Remarkably, though, Ruination (what a downer of a title!) succeeds in navigating its tortuous path between violent deeds and lacerating regrets by way of verbal comedy as well as Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of all the classic musical scores that could appeal to a choreographer, three are catnip: Ravel’s Bolero, Bizet’s Carmen, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Each has been set dozens of times and the veteran Swedish dancemaker Mats Ek has notched up all three.Such is the pull of Rite, in fact, that Ek has just created his second version, almost 40 years after his first. It wasn’t that he was unhappy with that earlier Rite, he told an interviewer, but he felt that the drama of the music had more to uncover – specifically on the subject of “young women being forced into a tradition, which has Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Carlos Acosta’s idea of putting live music first and foremost in BRB’s latest mixed bill was a no-brainer. The Midlands-based company, directed by Acosta since early 2020, is unique among British ballet companies in being able to call on its own full-time orchestra (the Royal Ballet has to share theirs with the Opera), and it happens to be a first-class band.So the prospect of Britten and Beethoven forming meaty chunks in the typical three-ballet sandwich promised a feast – on the aural front at least – in an evening entitled Into the Music, to which an appropriate response might be “Who Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Marshalling a mass of bodies around a stage is what all choreographers do. But nobody does it quite like Crystal Pite, the Canadian whose half-hour piece "Flight Pattern" – a comment on the global refugee crisis – was a hit for the Royal Ballet five years ago, earning an Olivier Award.She now returns with a full-evening extension of that material, adding two new sections that address equally big subjects, not least the rights of children to life and safety. This, along with a final section dealing with what Pite calls “the ultimate border crossing”, makes sense of the work’s over-arching Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Although the loss of its 96-year-old royal patron can hardly have come as a surprise, Covent Garden has been slow to register it. The gold-embroidered ERs on those luscious red velvet stage curtains remain in place, and when Wednesday night’s audience was invited to stand for the playing of the National Anthem, the uninvited vocal response was heard to “send her victorious”. Old habits die hard.Perhaps those same loyal subjects were also oblivious to the oddity of the Royal Ballet’s dedication of the opening performance of its new season to the late Queen. Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling is Read more ...
David Nice
Jean-Guihen Queyras and five dancers of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company in the Bach Cello Suites was a thing of constantly evolving wonder. So too is Pavel Kolesnikov’s ongoing dialogue with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, different every time he plays them. Would De Keersmaeker alone be able to hold her own dancing to this inventory of technical rigour and human emotions?For the first, muted-silver hour, it was hard to say, given the difficulty of interpreting much in the dancer’s vocabulary and tallying it with what we were hearing in Kolesnikov’s myriad worlds. The sensation was Read more ...
David Nice
For once, a festival theme has meaning. “Tra la carne e il cielo”, “Between flesh and heaven”, is how Pier Paolo Pasolini, the centenary of whose birth we mark this year, defined his early experience of hearing the Siciliana movement of Bach’s First Violin Sonata (adding that he inclined to the fleshly). It provided the perfect epigraph to the four Ravenna Festival performances I attended this year, three of them as stunning as any hybrid event I’ve ever witnessed.The choice of return dates – regretfully missing out on Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" this year, though I did by chance Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Superstition, herd instinct, brutality, base terror. Whatever the precise narrative themes of Pina Bausch's response to The Rite of Spring – the most admired of dozens of dance settings of Igor Stravinsky’s score – it’s clear that it concerns aspects of behaviour deep-rooted in the human animal.“How would you dance if you knew you were about to die?” was the question posed by the choreographer to her dancers back in 1975. And that visceral immediacy is brought to the fore by a 36-strong company of dancers assembled from across 14 African countries expressly for the performance of this Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Ever since his re-staging of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne has managed to update the art of storytelling through dance steps and gesture in a way that others have struggled to achieve.This new re-working of his 2000 dance-noir, The Car Man, has been adapted for the Royal Albert Hall with a catwalk stage that allows the audience to get up close and very personal with the dancers.In "Harmony, population 975", a mysterious stranger (Will Bozier as Luca) arrives in answer to a sign that reads "Man Wanted", and carnal havoc ensues. Lana, played seductively by Zizi Strallen, grows into Read more ...