wed 02/04/2025

dance

Jewels, The Australian Ballet, Royal Opera House review - a sparkling parade of great dancing

Helen Hawkins

Every time you see Jewels, George Balanchine’s masterpiece from 1967, something new emerges from its treasure trove. What the Australian Ballet pleasurably bring to the fore is its playful, and play-acting, side.

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Carlos at 50, Royal Opera House review - lovingly designed gala from a still impressive star

Helen Hawkins

On the day Mick Jagger turned 80, that spring chicken Carlos Acosta, 50 this year, returned to the stage of the Royal Opera House, which he had left in 2015 after 17 years. Carlos at 50 was a wonderfully sunny, warm embrace of a return: the audience greeted his first appearance ecstatically, and his wide grin reflected how happy he was to be there too.

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theartsdesk at the Ravenna Festival - invisible cities and possible dreams

David Nice

Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship events, meetings of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra with players from other places – since 1997, they have included Sarajevo, Lebanon, Kenya, Iran and this year Jordan – will always be the big cornerstones of the Ravenna Festival.

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Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras, Sadler's Wells - a roaring start to the Flamenco Festival

Jenny Gilbert

When flamenco first came out of the shadows and started to fill big theatres, it was like something out of a historical pageant. The shows that played London in the early 1990s harked back to an imagined gypsy past where old men hammered rhythms on blacksmiths’ anvils and women swirled extravagant frills. The crudely amplified music lost much of its detail but audiences lapped it up anyway.

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Untitled, 2023 / Corybantic Games / Anastasia Act III, Royal Ballet review - a magnificent end to the season

Jenny Gilbert

Is it a cop-out for an artist to label a piece of work “Untitled”? Painters and sculptors make a habit of it, reasoning that they want to leave the viewer free to bring to the experience what they will, unhampered and unlimited by prior information. Odd, then, that dance, being such an ambiguous, free-associating art form, should be so far behind the curve.

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Requiem, Opera North review - partnership and diversity

Robert Beale

Innovation is always a risky business. Opera North’s vision and ambition for this production is to create, in effect, a new genre: a combination of staged choral-orchestral performance with contemporary dance.

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Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT1), Sadler's Wells review - an extinction rebellion in dance

Jenny Gilbert

The timing was impeccable, though almost certainly accidental. As protesters lay prostrate in The Mall in a mass “die-in” on the day designated as Earth Day, and as many thousands more urged action against climate change outside the Houses of Parliament, Nederlands Dans Theater was giving its final London performance of a powerful new ballet called Figures in Extinction [1.0].

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Jungle Book reimagined, Sadler's Wells review - a doomy revision of the Kipling stories

Helen Hawkins

Akram Khan Company promises “a magical dance-theatre retelling of Kipling’s classic”, and that’s more or less what you get. The choreography is striking and inventive, the dancing and staging superb.

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Cinderella, Royal Ballet review - the first British ballet learns the language of flowers

Jenny Gilbert

The urge to redesign a heritage ballet is a curious one, given not just the expense but the fact that the main draw of an old ballet is the steps and the music, which stay the same whatever the stage dressing.

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Tom Dale Company, The Place review - immersive and genre-busting

Jenny Gilbert

With all the talk – and, frankly, fear – around AI and the increasing dominance of the digital world, it’s fascinating to see what dance has to say about it.

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