dance
Boston Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 05 July 2013
In a summer awash with Russian ballet, at its best extravagant, limpid, spectacular - an experience of emotions processed through the eyes - a visit by an American company comes from a quite different sensory position: dance as intelligent motion, rhythmically schooled athleticism. Read more...
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Rosas, Drumming/ The Forsythe Company, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 26 June 2013
William Forsythe and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in a week - it has to be Sadler’s Wells, the theatre to sample some of the world’s best dance stuff. De Keersmaeker’s Rosas are briefly here to take part in Sadler’s "Sampled", a new thread of summer performances surrounding a single famous piece with chat, film, interactivity and other related things. Read more... |
Mayerling, Royal BalletSunday, 16 June 2013
My great-grandmother used to say, "In the fall, leaves fall," meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a principal since 1993, retired in the role of her choosing, Kenneth MacMillan’s Mary Vetsera, a crazed, sexed-up nymphet with a death-wish. Read more... |
Swan Lake, English National Ballet, Royal Albert HallThursday, 13 June 2013
So much is wrong with Derek Deane’s arena Swan Lake, as if he read a poem and rewrote it as a press release. If you want big fat images of swans, 60 white-feathered girls in precision-tooled lines, this is for you. Take your photos on your phone, take them home and say, “I was there.” If you want to feel the private passion of the story, surrender to the music and the peculiar fantasy, to examine your own motivations and ability to choose love, forget this - go elsewhere. Read more... |
Mayerling, The Royal BalletThursday, 06 June 2013
So last night the Royal Ballet’s first couple, at shockingly short notice, gave their last performance with the company, in MacMillan’s Mayerling, a terrifying, piteous experience that I know I’ll never see surpassed. Johan Kobborg and Alina Cojocaru have blessed this millennium, both artists who used the lightness of their natural physical abilities to tear into dark emotional places, and who last night tore the Royal Opera House’s sell-out crowd apart. Read more... |
iTMOi, Akram Khan Company, Sadler's Wells TheatreFriday, 31 May 2013
When the public “got” or did not “get” the original Rite of Spring of Nijinsky and Stravinsky exactly 100 years ago this week, they couldn't call on emotional logic or aesthetic familiarity or symbolic recognition to help. Only imaginative reflex could cause some people to describe in words (the “fearful regrouping of the cells”) or pictures (Valentine Gross’s vivid, instant pencil sketches) what the iconoclastic piece felt like to experience. Read more... |
Raven Girl, Royal Ballet/ Witch-Hunt, Bern Ballett/ The Great Gatsby, Northern BalletSaturday, 25 May 2013
Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern Ballett, both in the Royal Opera House complex, and Northern Ballet’s visit to London with David Nixon’s new The Great Gatsby. (To say nothing of David Bintley's Aladdin and even less of Peter Schaufuss's Midnight Express.) |
Sylvie Guillem, 6000 Miles Away, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 21 May 2013
People go to see Sylvie Guillem the way they used to go to Isadora Duncan or Anna Pavlova, to see a living legend, a game-changer. Guillem became one of dance’s handful of game-changers not when she was the controversially over-fashioned classical ballerina, nor even when she was the arrestingly individual dramatic ballerina in great British narrative ballets. Read more... |
An Evening for Hospices of Hope, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 14 May 2013
Thank you, Romania, for ballerina Alina Cojocaru, pianist Dinu Lipatti, sopranos Angela Gheorghiu and Ileana Cotrubas, sculptor Constantin Brancusi, tennis player Ilie Nastase, playwright Eugène Ionesco, conductor Sergiu Celibidache, actors Edward G Robinson and Johnny Weissmuller among other Romanians who have added so much artistry and entertainment to modern life. Read more... |
Hofesh Shechter/ Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Puz/zle, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 30 April 2013
I was trying to remember the last time a choreographer actually tried to make the audience smile in the past few months. Dance-lovers are suckers for guilt. Read more... |
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