dance
Hunting legendary treasure with ballet's Indiana Jones - Pierre Lacotte 1932-2023Wednesday, 19 April 2023
As any archaeologist knows, digging up a sarcophagus is a nailbiting business. How small are the chances that inside the shredded linen wrappings will lie a recognisable body with some vestiges of its former life upon it? Read more... |
'You want to cry from loving to do it so much' - Lynn Seymour 1939-2023Wednesday, 15 March 2023
As a critic, I’ve rarely felt compelled to mourn publicly about an artist. Mourning goes somewhere beyond the usual sense of loss and gratitude when someone's death has been announced. But it's the only word when the departed is one of the very few individuals - or their songs or books or pictures - who get in your bloodstream, who get into your optic nerves or your inner ear, who magnify and sharpen your experience of being alive. Read more... |
Royal Opera House lullabies for Little AmalTuesday, 26 October 2021
“I want to tell her that people will be good,” Tewodros Aregawe of Phosphoros Theatre confided to us as Little Amal closed her eyes on the giant bed made up for her in the Paul Hamlyn Hall, “that all the people with kind eyes who have walked alongside her and listened to her story will be louder than those who wish she wasn’t there”. Read more... |
The Royal Ballet - variations on a comebackFriday, 16 April 2021
Like the British high street, the once richly diverse landscape of dance in the UK is likely to look very different once lockdown is fully lifted. There will be losses, noticeably among the smaller companies whose survival was always precarious. There will be downsizings. There will be painful gaps where a major talent has given up the fight, retired to run a flower shop or become a hill farmer. Read more... |
'She was Paris': RIP Zizi Jeanmaire (1924-2020)Wednesday, 22 July 2020
"You talk like Marlene Dietrich, you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire, your clothes are all made by Balmain, and there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair…" . Read more... |
'If they had been any closer my face would have misted up': filming 'Men at the Barre'Tuesday, 26 May 2020
“That’s Marcelino Sambé, he’s wonderful,” said the artistic administrator of the Royal Ballet as I followed her down one of the many corridors that weave throughout the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. “He’s a newly promoted Principal, a very special talent indeed!” I looked over my shoulder at the figure disappearing through some doors. Read more... |
The deathless Alicia Alonso, in personFriday, 18 October 2019
The magnificent, controversial Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, who asserted that she would live to 200, died yesterday in Havana, aged nearly 99. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Riga - 43,290 Latvians sing and dance for their countryTuesday, 24 July 2018
"They incessantly break down, destroy and fragment the mistrust that exists among people," wrote a Latvian journalist of a folklore group during the start of the Baltic countries' "singing revolution" against Soviet rule in 1988. Read more... |
Michael Chance on continuing opera in Hampshire: 'good people like to work with good people'Wednesday, 06 June 2018
Out of the blue comes a phone call. A freelance career is based on those to a certain extent. Certainly mine has been. But this one was a bit different. “Would you come and talk to us about the way forward?”. I soon learnt that what this actually meant was, “would you launch and run a new opera festival for us?” |
Manon, Royal Ballet review - glitter and betrayFriday, 30 March 2018
"Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets," declared Puccini in annoucing his own operatic setting of the Abbé Prévost's 1731 novel Manon Lescaut. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Close-Up: The Twiggy Musical, Menier Chocolate Factory revie...
The Biba dresses are way too colourful, the shop’s interior about 10 times too bright… and did anybody really say ”happening threads”...
The Creator review - bold, beautiful, flawed sci-fi epic
It has been seven years since Gareth Edwards directed, for me, the best of the new generation of Star Wars films, Rogue One. Having made...
Falstaff, Opera North review - going green and having fun
There’s a charmingly retro feel to Opera North’s new Falstaff, which comes from it being done as part of their new “...
The Old Oak review - a searing ode to solidarity
Ken Loach has occasionally invested his realist TV dramas and movies with moments of magical realism – football inspiring them in The Golden...
Unbelievable, Criterion Theatre review - Derren Brown-direct...
Unbelievable is a strange title for a slightly strange show, the brainchild of Derren Brown, Andrew O’Connor and Andy Nyman, a...
Black Sabbath: The Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingh...
These days Black Sabbath aren’t short of admirers in the arts and even further afield. Artists as disparate as veteran soul man, Charles Bradley...
Album: Jorja Smith - Falling or Flying
Jorja Smith said she named her new album Falling or Flying to describe the uncertainty she’s felt about her career following the success...
Fung, RPO, Schwarz, Cadogan Hall review - high style from ne...
You go to a concert, three-quarters of it popular classics – also great masterpieces – having been told you have to hear a brilliant young cellist...
Michael Peppiatt: Giacometti in Paris review - approaching t...
We begin with a dead-end. In 1966, Michael Peppiatt – at the time “an obscure young man” – travelled to...
Album: Oneohtrix Point Never - Again
The music of Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – exists at the sonic/...