sat 29/03/2025

dance

The Weathering/Solo Echo/DGV, Royal Ballet review - the dancer as chameleon

Jenny Gilbert

Of all the expectations one might have of a new ballet from a choreographer raised on street dance who has made work about the American prison system, serene loveliness isn’t one of them.

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Swan Lake, Royal Ballet review - a magnificent revival

Jenny Gilbert

In a week that saw the Royal Opera House lit up in the colours of the Ukrainian flag and its orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem, many theatres and concert halls found ways to express their sympathy for that country’s desperate plight.

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La Mif review - Swiss docu-drama focuses on troubled teens

Saskia Baron

La Mif is French slang for family  - it’s the cool kids practice of reversing key words known as ‘verlan’ (itself l’envers backwards) to create their own language.

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NDT2, Sadler's Wells review - a diverse triple bill

Katie Colombus

It's not every junior dance company that could sell out a house at Sadler's Wells. But NDT2 – younger sibling of one of Europe’s top contemporary dance ensembles, Nederlands Dans Theater, have grown over the last 35 years into a box office blockbuster in their own right.

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Saturday Night Fever, Peacock Theatre review - crowd-pleaser stays true to its roots

Gary Naylor

Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college, prospects were strictly limited.

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Acosta Danza, Sadler's Wells review - here comes the sun

Jenny Gilbert

If Carlos Acosta could have bottled the year-round sunshine of his native Cuba, he would have. Instead he did the next best thing and founded Acosta Danza. Seven years later, years which included a UK tour kiboshed by the first lockdown, when the company only narrowly made it on to the last plane back to Havana, the troupe is sleeker, slightly smaller, but if anything even more ebullient.

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Kontakthof, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch review - struggling to make contact

Jenny Gilbert

Twelve years may have passed since her earthly demise, but you still hear people say they saw Pina Bausch the other night. Bausch remains synonymous with the company she founded, Tanztheater Wuppertal, and with a style of dance theatre that launched an entire new category.

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Raymonda, English National Ballet, Coliseum review - a creaky old standard, lavishly restored to health

Jenny Gilbert

Neglected classics, whether books, plays or ballets, are usually neglected for a reason, and so it is with the three-act ballet Raymonda. A hit in 1898 for the Imperial ballet in St Petersburg but unperformed in this country since the 1960s, its ineffectual heroine, fuzzy sense of geography and offensively silly plot have made it impossible to stage in full – at least in Britain.

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Best of 2021: Dance

Jenny Gilbert

It was never going to be a bumper year, just a bumpy one. With theatres dark until May or later, the usual 11 or 12 months of potential live-dance going was reduced to four or five. There was one bright shaft of optimism in late spring, and another in the autumn, when the gloom-clouds parted to allow a few weeks of almost-normality. But now we seem to have come full circle.

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Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!, Sadler's Wells Theatre review - new candy, but the nuts are off

Ismene Brown

The legendary quip of a sophisticated ballet critic that we are all one Nutcracker nearer death never rang so true as now. One goes to the theatre with one’s heart in one’s mouth, behind the partypooping mask.

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