dance
La Fille Mal Gardée, Royal BalletWednesday, 21 April 2010
If you're going to dance before the future King of England, and your company bears his family's crest, you'd better dance well. Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Birmingham Royal Ballet, London ColiseumTuesday, 20 April 2010
Good dancing - never mind great dancing - calls for an investment of imagination in every point of the foot, every raise of the arm. Why otherwise do the constant drill of turning out the leg, stretching the instep, taking fifth position, if the performer does not find something to stimulate them to make it personal, to dream it, to claim it for their own nuance? Does the violinist play Schubert thinking that it is enough just to get the notes right? Read more... |
Cinderella, Royal BalletSunday, 18 April 2010
No longer, it seems, need ballet's most transformable heroine languish by the seasonal fireside. It's true that you'll have to wait until Christmas to see the most visually striking Cinderella of all again - Ashley Page's fitfully ingenious Scottish Ballet version showcasing magical designs by Antony McDonald. But English National Ballet's Cinders is out and about this spring, and now Ashton's first full-length triumph returns with period glitter to Covent Garden. Read more... |
Mark Morris's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, London ColiseumThursday, 15 April 2010
In 1988 young contemporary choreographer Mark Morris, newly installed in Brussels’ munificent Théâtre de la Monnaie as resident dancemaker to succeed the Emperor of Big, Maurice Béjart, thought not just big but grandly off-beam. Read more... |
Magia de la Danza, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, London ColiseumTuesday, 06 April 2010
“It’ll be tricky to write about,” said the man next to me last night, a Cubaphile. “It's the good, the bad and the awful.” The Cubans’ second programme, The Magic of Dance, is an old-fashioned warhorse of showstoppers from the classics, a tapas bar of Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Coppelia, Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Gottschalk Symphony. Come again, the last one? It’s a company conga by Alicia Alonso. Enough said. Read more... |
Kontakthof, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreSunday, 04 April 2010
A house of contact, a place to make contact - this bare, evocative title sits on one of Pina Bausch’s most appealing works, and also its most elastic. Brought this week to the Barbican posthumously, staged by her company on two amateur casts, Kontakthof didn’t look 32 years old, it looked both timeless and as fresh as fledglings cracking out of their egg shells. Read more... |
Swan Lake, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, London ColiseumWednesday, 31 March 2010
In the Cuban National Ballet’s Swan Lake fourth act, the corps of swans do a curious, aggressive attacking run you don’t see in any other production - they lower their heads and charge at Prince Siegfried, with hands fluttering angrily behind them, as if they were the evil magicians, not the creatures under a spell. Read more... |
Concerto/The Judas Tree/Elite Syncopations, Royal BalletTuesday, 30 March 2010
Another night, another cast, another Judas Tree (see first-night review below this) - and yet more proof of what a tough, durable, shape-shifting piece Kenneth MacMillan created in his last year of life. Read more... |
Cinderella, English National Ballet, touringThursday, 25 March 2010
Was it with a hollow laugh that ENB programmed Cinderella for the election period - as a reminder that glittery fairy phaetons are in fact pumpkins with money? Was it a hint that ballet needs political fairy godmothers? With airwaves full of budget cuts, nothing was more welcome yesterday than to go into a Bristol Hippodrome matinee, full of noisy children, and watch this delightful fairytale of wish-fulfilment laid before them. Even better, with the radiant Elena Glurdjidze as the... Read more... |
Blaze: the Streetdance Sensation, Peacock TheatreTuesday, 16 March 2010
With a title like that, and a slug across the posters that so boastingly prejudges last night's premiere, some of us might keep our sceptical specs on when we turn up at the spirits-lowering Peacock Theatre to see this latest leap by mainstream stage forces onto the bandwagon of the most exciting trend in dance of the past 15 years. Sheathe those sceptical specs. This is a show blazing with talent and young exuberance, and it will rejuvenate you faster than a Red Bull. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Mike Hodges
Mike Hodges arrived in cinema through television, including a stint on the rightly revered Granada Television current affairs series World in...
Album: The Jayhawks - XOXO
If one song best captures the overall mood of XOXO, it's the Beatles-meets-country strains of "Living in a...
Dom Joly/ Daniel Sloss, Brent Cross reviews - UK's firs...
It was a weary and frustrated Dom Joly (**) who left the stage after performing the first drive-in comedy show in the UK. Sadly...
Classical music/Opera direct to home 19 – and two before a l...
It’s begun: very limited access to live music, the...
Les Blancs, National Theatre at Home review – triumphant rev...
Lorraine Hansberry’s debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened...
Back Roads review - nice cheekbones, not much else
Back Roads has languished largely unseen since its completion in 2017, and one can see why: lurid to the point of absurdity, this...
Family Romance, LLC review - the chameleon blues
Werner Herzog’s appearance in The Mandalorian paid for this deadpan,...
Toast, Lawrence Batley Theatre online review - pungent adapt...
I knew what a Howard Hodgkin painting would look like before I ever saw one because of...
Album: Polly Scattergood - In This Moment
A decade ago, Polly Scattergood was Mute Records’ newest, most-likely-to signing and, while she never crossed over like similar unconventional...
Theatre Lockdown Special 12: An American rarity, a British s...
Can this weekly lineup really now be three months old? As we move towards at least some degree of relaxation on the social restrictions that...