dance
The Most Incredible Thing, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 23 March 2011
There was not likely to be much ballet here, despite the Pet Shop Boys’ proud use of the word to distinguish their substantial three-act score. This delivers a richly James Bond-ish ride through big pop tunes, opulent filmic moments and some nice bumps between fantasy scene-setting and camp nightclubbing. Read more... |
Rhapsody/ Sensorium/ 'Still Life' at the Penguin Café, Royal BalletThursday, 17 March 2011
For those in the know, Sergei Polunin has been marked out as “the one to watch” from his schooldays. Since he won the Prix de Lausanne in 2006 and joined the Royal Ballet the following year, he has been “the next big thing”. Well, I’m here to tell you, after last night’s performance of Rhapsody, he is not the next big thing. He is the big thing now. Read more... |
Black & White, English National Ballet, London ColiseumThursday, 17 March 2011
At the 11th hour (as we all know from the current telly series), English National Ballet has pulled a gorgeous plum out of its back catalogue that throws open vistas of what a ballet company should be: Serge Lifar’s sumptuous Suite en Blanc. Why this beauty, laced with the hot Spanish deliciousness of Eduard Lalo’s 1881... Read more... |
Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With the English National Ballet, BBC FourWednesday, 09 March 2011
You thought Black Swan was a nightmare depiction of the ballet world? Now watch Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet, Part 1 and squirm. Compare Natalie Portman’s tormenting balletmaster with ENB’s Derek Deane, as each of them stages Swan Lake. Read more... |
Cleopatra, Northern Ballet, Leeds Grand TheatreSunday, 06 March 2011
Northern Ballet’s genes are rooted in the Royal Ballet’s narrative golden age of the Sixties, its most significant leader Christopher Gable having been the originally intended Romeo of Kenneth MacMillan’s iconic 1965 Romeo and Juliet. Read more... |
The Centaur and the Animal, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 01 March 2011
To achieve a black stage that emits or reflects no light is a hell of an achievement. To place a huge black horse with black rider onto that stage, without the slightest noise, and to contrive a black shadow on the black, is to create an image found in the fathomless wells of subconscious imagery, and the skill of that vision and realisation of it is something I doubt I'm going to forget. Read more... |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal BalletMonday, 28 February 2011
Some ballets are drugs in themselves - you’re under their sway no matter what the performance. Other ballets need drugs to help. This new Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is definitely of the second kind, a very odd, very shallow, very bright and brilliantly bold staging, that makes no sense, that offers no depth, but which I suspect would be a blast if one were slightly stoned. But to slip a complimentary spliff under the programme's whirligig cover would take it out of the small-... Read more... |
I Don't Believe in Outer Space, The Forsythe Company, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 22 February 2011
An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, ... Read more... |
Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena, Sadler's WellsSaturday, 19 February 2011
There are gifted dancers and there are creatures of the stage. You know the difference immediately. The latter have something shamanic about them, ageless at any age, almost eccentric in their power. Eva Yerbabuena is one of those very rare creatures, to whom I succumb as helplessly as a rabbit in front of a cobra. Read more... |
Ballet Boyz, The Talent, AylesburyTuesday, 15 February 2011
Aylesbury, a town without a theatre, has built itself one - a gleaming, glass-fronted, smack-you-in-the-eye 1,500-seater, driven and supported by the district council. High Wycombe and Milton Keynes must beware, so thin are the pickings these days for the regional theatres. The pity is that the Ballet Boyz’ show The Talent last night was the only night of decent dance programmed in this amazing new venue for half of 2011. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
London Tide, National Theatre review - haunting moody river...
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this...
Watts, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Bignamini, Barbica...
Anyone who’d booked to hear soprano Sally Matthews or to witness the rapid progress of conductor Daniele Rustioni – the initial draw for me –...
Album: Taylor Swift - Tortured Poets Department: The Antholo...
Taylor Swift’s unfathomable ability to articulate human emotion shines as brightly as ever in her latest double album The Tortured Poets...
The Songs of Joni Mitchell, Roundhouse review - fans (old an...
For most people’s 40th birthday celebrations, they might get a few...
Fantastic Machine review - photography's story from one...
The first photograph was taken nearly 200 years ago in France by Joseph Niépce, and the first picture of a person was taken in Paris by Louis...
Jonathan Pie, Duke of York's Theatre review - spoof pol...
If you don't like sweary comics – Jonathan Pie uses the c-word liberally – then this may not be the show for you. In fact if you're a Tory, ditto...
Baby Reindeer, Netflix review - a misery memoir disturbingly...
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with...
Machinal, The Old Vic review - note-perfect pity and terror
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Renaissance woman Sophie Treadwell’s ...
Simon Boccanegra, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester...
If ever more evidence were needed of Sir Mark Elder’s untiring zest for exploration and love of the thrill of live opera performance, it was this...
All You Need Is Death review - a future folk horror classic
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who...