Dance
Ismene Brown
Great Mariinsky ballerinas are a breed apart, even from Bolshoi women. They take the stage with a consciousness of entitlement that’s thrilling to watch, and when this almost sacred sense of mystique and grace instilled in St Petersburg comes with vivid expressive distinction too, then there really is nothing like it. Even if three American 20th-century ballets might not be thought the likeliest territory to make such discoveries, what a night for ballerinas last night was. Viktoria Terëshkina and Alina Somova are on their way to joining the peerless Uliana Lopatkina at the high table.Maybe Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is all too easy to be cynical about the ballet version of Don Quixote. With almost no part for the title character, it is a 19th-century Russian take on faux-Spanish dancing, a farce in which the barber Basilio longs for the charming Kitri, while her father wants her to marry a rich fop. As the Radio Times used to say, “Much hilarity ensues.”Well, actually, it rarely does, for funny ballets are few and far between. Frederick Ashton achieved it in his miraculous La fille mal gardée; Jerome Robbins’s The Concert can make a grown (wo)man weep with happiness on the right night; Baryshnikov Read more ...
judith.flanders
Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both West and East, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the 20th century before and after the Revolution. The Mariinsky, once his home, is a premier exponent of his multifaceted styles. Chopiniana, his 1907 “white” ballet (known in the West as Les Sylphides) (pictured right, photo V Baranovsky), can be inert, shapeless, lifeless. Indeed, it all too frequently is. Saddled with an unappealing score (Chopin Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For most dancers the first base is to get principal roles. For a star like Carlos Acosta, second base becomes urgent: to find the career path beyond classical ballet. Like Sylvie Guillem he seeks out a new contemporary dance path to fulfil, being still full of glorious physical vigour and still well under 40. But it turns out to be about wise investment. Guillem invested long ago in blue-chip stock, William Forsythe, Mats Ek, Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, the choreographers with whom she now extends her stellar career into her mid-forties. Acosta hasn't invested so wisely.The London Read more ...
judith.flanders
Act IV is the core of Swan Lake. It doesn’t seem so theatrically, being a peculiar 20-minute bolt-on after an interval that frequently lasts longer than the act that follows. But musically it transcends everything that has gone before, its thready little waltz one of the most delicately tragic things Tchaikovsky ever wrote. And balletically, Lev Ivanov’s rigidly structured classicism draws viewers into the terrifying void that is death. While emotionally the frozen swan-maiden of Act II and the brazen strumpet of Act III here merge to create the incarnation of suffering woman.Well, that is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An obsession with sex and death underlies many of the immortal works of 19th-century classical ballet. Giselle is seduced, La Sylphide does the seducing, the Sleeping Beauty is awakened by sex, the Swan Queen is an apparition of death to Prince Siegfried who is easily waylaid by her doppelgänger, Odile of the 32 fouettées. Roland Petit brought it all out in the open with his ballets in the next century. As one observer said in 1949 of the premiere in London of his ballet Carmen, you could see the men’s trouser buttons popping.In the three of his famous works on parade last night at the London Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's 50 years since the mighty Kirov Ballet made their debut London tour - reeling from Nureyev's defection days before at the Paris airport. The tour was promoted by the unique impresarios of Soviet culture, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser. Half a century on, the pair are still indefatigably promoting the company, now named Mariinsky Ballet, whose season at Covent Garden opens on Monday, 25 July and runs to Saturday, 13 August.The St Petersburg company has been lying low while their Moscow rivals, the Bolshoi, made the Royal Opera House their summer home for the past few years - but it was only Read more ...
Ismene Brown
All ballet companies dream of finding a genuine creative talent among their ranks, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, visiting from the farthest end of the world ballet map, have one in Andrew Simmons. The unknown name on their triple bill on this rare visit to London shows a young mind drawn naturally to grace and understated expressiveness.His creation, A Song in the Dark, is effortlessly better than the busy, inconsequential work by Jorma Elo, one of the most noised names in ballet at the moment, for reasons that escape my understanding. Both pieces are leotard ballets, Elo’s in red, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Like planets crossing in the skies, light years apart, but by some ocular illusion coinciding, this conjunction of the two most thrilling young Bolshoi stars in the world and Frederick Ashton’s rarely staged Romeo and Juliet really must be seen. Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev are real-life lovers as well as phenomenal work colleagues and passionate actors. The freshness of youth, the unhindered outpouring of emotion, the finish of their dancing, and their direct stage personalities enrich to bursting a chamber-sized telling of the tragedy that's refreshingly intimate by comparison Read more ...
judith.flanders
Only three years ago, Hofesh Shechter, the Israeli-born, London-based choreographer, made the leap into the big leagues, almost overnight, with his Uprising/In Your Rooms double bill. The following year he produced a "Choreographer’s Cut", a bulked-up version in the Roundhouse, part dance, part gig. 2010’s Political Mother was received with rapture, so what next? Yes, of course, another Choreographer’s Cut, this time Political Mother in an amped-up version with 24 musicians and 16 dancers in front of a Sadler’s Wells audience, the front stalls removed and transformed into a wannabe mosh pit. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“What I love about her is her emotion, her true emotion. She’s a ball of energy and emotion all together, quite an amazing thing. From the first time I saw her, I thought I want her to be my girlfriend.” Ivan Vasiliev, the young Bolshoi Ballet superstar, is talking about his girlfriend - though he could also be Romeo talking about Juliet. His girlfriend is another Bolshoi superstar, Natalia Osipova, and she is of course his Juliet in the ballet of Romeo and Juliet being performed at the London Coliseum this week, and which is a must-see on more levels even than two fabulous young stars who Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Roland Petit died this morning aged 87, a world choreographer of chic and erotic theatricality who blew away the French classical ideal in a roar of post-war sexual liberation. He created an all-male corps of swans for Swan Lake long before Matthew Bourne, and his roles for his exquisite wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, repositioned ballet drama upon the femme fatale rather than the virgin. Arguably, though, for British ballet-goers he was above all the seducer who almost lured Margot Fonteyn away to France (and who got her to have a nose job) just as she was leading the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to Read more ...