dance
The Featherstonehaughs, The PlaceMonday, 08 November 2010
It’s a reasonable argument, I'd say, that it is only worth going out to see dance, or anything else, if it’s probably going to be better than telly or conversation with friends. And only if it’s also worth spending a couple of hours travel by train, say £30 to £40, tickets all told, plus a drink on the town. Something for the Arts Council to take on board when considering who to lash out £364,044 taxpayers’ annual subsidy on, no? Or too base a criterion? Read more... |
Sylvia, Royal BalletWednesday, 03 November 2010
Places, please, deliciousness, please. This is Delibes, a man whose music goes with delectable disbelief, and this is that zany thing, a Fifties nymph ballet, so let us sip hallucinogenic Arcadian cocktails and leave normality at the cloakroom. But the sheer prettiness of Léo Delibes's ballets (La Source, Coppélia, Sylvia) is too much for most dancemakers to digest. Even a choreographer so oozing charm as Frederick Ashton made no classic with his 1952 staging of Sylvia.... Read more... |
Emanuel Gat Dance, Sadler's Wells/ Henri Oguike Dance, TouringTuesday, 02 November 2010
How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own? How about with an instinct, a yearning to entertain? Surely not! Read more... |
Iphigenie auf Tauris, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsFriday, 29 October 2010
Iphigenia is an abandoned child, almost murdered by her father, lost in bewilderment, captured and indoctrinated in an artificial existence. It hardly matters that her father was the legendary Greek hero Agamemnon, her mother the notorious Clytemnestra. Read more... |
Nearly Ninety, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Barbican TheatreTuesday, 26 October 2010
I’ll retain lifelong, life-changing memories of the joyous mysteries of Merce Cunningham’s dances, so it’s unimportant for me that Nearly Ninety, his final creation before his death last year, won’t be one of them. Read more... |
The Thrill of It All, Forced Entertainment, Riverside StudiosTuesday, 26 October 2010
It’s pretty hard to describe a Forced Entertainment show. But let’s try anyway: imagine a stage full of crazy dancers, the men in black wigs, the women in white ones, prancing around, flinging their arms in the air, mistiming their high kicks, and then running frantically up and down the stage. The lighting slides from bright white to sick pink, and the music is pop tunes with Japanese lyrics. Welcome to a wonderful world of controlled zany exhilaration. Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, Birmingham Royal Ballet & English National Ballet, touringThursday, 21 October 2010
“Rudolf thought, what you wanted out of life you had to get straightaway, because if you thought about it too long, you might be dead,” said the ballerina Patricia Ruanne, the first Juliet in Rudolf Nureyev’s version of Romeo and Juliet. Coming a dozen years after Kenneth MacMillan’s landmark Royal Ballet version, Nureyev’s - for London Festival Ballet - is regrettably eclipsed, for what a powerful piece of theatre it is, and this autumn the chance to see both versions side by side... Read more... |
Trisha Brown Dance Company, Tate Modern & Queen Elizabeth HallWednesday, 20 October 2010
A snaky conga of women in white pantsuits snuggling their loins together in a Spanish dance, and wiggling their way along a wall behind a Joseph Beuys installation may well be one of the indelible sights of my dance year. Mine, and that of only a few dozen other people, who happened to be in the right Tate Modern gallery at the right moment when this extraordinary little event took place. Read more... |
La Valse/ Invitus Invitam/ Winter Dreams/ Theme & Variations, Royal BalletFriday, 15 October 2010
The ballet world knows uniquely well how to stage gracious gestures to one of its own - dance history is close-knit and last night the Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the season turned into a surprising celebration of the Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso in her 90th year. Even more of a stunner to see Alonso herself sitting in the Royal Box, and coming on stage at the end to a standing ovation, tiny, chalk-white, red-lipped, with black glasses over her blind eyes, giving a remarkably deep... Read more... |
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Cow Piece/ Akram Khan, Vertical Road, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 13 October 2010
The annual Dance Umbrella festival is mostly for the dance industry to talk to itself, I’ve come to feel, with a timetable so closely packed that only Londoners, and specifically those in the tight roaring circle of the know, will get to sample much of it. Then you get two such stand-out evenings as Akram Khan’s and Jonathan Burrows’ in town within a week of each other, two of the major talents in the world, who come running at the idea of theatre from opposite ends - the one spectacular and... Read more... |
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