dance
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... |
The Art of Touch/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Wycombe SwanWednesday, 06 October 2010
The Blitz may be about to descend on dance in theatres, but Rambert have the authentic British grit under fire. They truck on into a bleak autumn with the courage to present to the straitened nation a new commission of music and dance, and a new acquisition from an unknown German choreographer. Perhaps most radically, three female choreographers on one bill (and that’s not something I’ve known in my lifetime, at least not at this level). Read more... |
Stephen Petronio Company, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 06 October 2010
Nico Muhly at the piano, Stephen Petronio in a false beard, a storm-at-sea theme derived from The Tempest - how hip is that? I Drink the Air Before Me, a new work for the Stephen Petronio Company as the opening night of this year’s Dance Umbrella (the annual international modern dance fest that packs London’s venues for the month), had promise. The young composer delivered, the theme had its moments, but the picture above is a fiction - it’s a wish-list, as so many... Read more... |
Onegin, Royal BalletThursday, 30 September 2010
One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg in the central roles last night for the Royal Ballet's opening salvo of the season, there wasn’t a hair's-breadth spare in the house, every place gone, even the standing ones in the gods where you can only... Read more... |
Russell Maliphant Company, AfterLight, Sadler's WellsThursday, 30 September 2010
We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a distilled 60-minute spell of dark, hushed beauty that touches on disturbing things: on ecstasy, madness, desire, jealousy, resignation to the void, and of course on Vaclav Nijinsky. Read more... |
Birmingham Royal Ballet, Pointes of View, Birmingham HippodromeTuesday, 28 September 2010
It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties period piece, nestled capriciously like a matron en décolleté in the bosom of its season-opening bill fielding the semi-skimmed abstractness of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto and Twyla Tharp’s stunning Eighties sneaker... Read more... |
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