dance

Mayerling, The Royal Ballet/ Le Jeune Homme et La Mort, English National Ballet

Ismene Brown Sunday, 21 April 2013

The acting tradition is refined in British ballet to a height not matched anywhere else in the world - distilled in Frederick Ashton’s ballets, expanded in Kenneth MacMillan’s.

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Ecstasy and Death, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

Ismene Brown Friday, 19 April 2013

Is it death that makes us go back to the ballet? The one artform where it is so glorified, so exquisitely reimagined as an experience of regret, hope, ecstasy or bleakest resignation that we will go to drink it in again and again, to preview our own? Maybe that’s it. Opera is about living in the threat of death (all those tubercular arias and declarations from the heart of bonfires). Theatre is all about living, imperfectly.

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Romeo and Juliet, National Ballet of Canada, Sadler's Wells

Ismene Brown Thursday, 18 April 2013

The combination of Romeo, Juliet and the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky should be almost too much for the blood pressure. Those defiant lovers, that emotive yet intellectual young Russian craftsman of ballet. Hence the huge turn-out of balletomanes for National Ballet of Canada at Sadler’s Wells last night.

The Rite of Spring/Petrushka, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells

Matthew Paluch Sunday, 14 April 2013

In String of Rites, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned three works as a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 Le sacre du printemps. It opened with the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s double bill, The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. Both scores are by Igor Stravinsky, created for the original choreography by Nijinsky and Michel Fokine respectively.

Midnight Express, Peter Schaufuss Ballet, London Coliseum

Ismene Brown Thursday, 11 April 2013

Yok is a fine Turkish word meaning “there isn’t any”. You use it for “no”, as in, say - is Midnight Express any good? Yok.

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Nacho Duato, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London Coliseum

Matthew Paluch Tuesday, 09 April 2013

The Mikhailovsky Ballet closed their epic two-week Coliseum season with modern works by their director, Nacho Duato, presumably hoping to display their capabilities at all dance forms. Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness is a work in two acts first created for the Weimar Arts Festival in 1999.

La Bayadère, The Royal Ballet

Ismene Brown Sunday, 07 April 2013

Jane Austen would approve, I think, of the plot of La Bayadère, which is about class and wealth getting in the way of love. She might have difficulty with the setting. It is a grand, exotically located ballet offering us an fantastical India of Rajahs, tiger-hunts and sex-slaves - or rather temple-dancers, whose job is to carry holy water to the needy and put up with the unwanted lust of the High Brahmin.

Laurencia, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London Coliseum

Judith Flanders Wednesday, 03 April 2013

It’s not often you go to a ballet to watch a history lesson unfold, but Laurencia, the 1939 Soviet ballet choreographed by Vakhtang Chabukiani, gives us exactly that, and a gripping one under the froth and fun.

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Don Quixote, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London Coliseum

Judith Flanders Sunday, 31 March 2013

If you want virtuosity, there’s only one place to be in London right now, and that’s watching the Mikhailovsky’s fine production of that demented old warhorse, Don Quixote, with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev in the leads.

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Giselle, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London Coliseum

Judith Flanders Wednesday, 27 March 2013

When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual suspects.