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Sad Book, Hackney Empire review - What we feel, what we show, and the many ways we deal with sadness
Jenny Gilbert
Who goes to the theatre to feel sad? That is, knowing full well that they won’t be going home with a skip in their step. Many people, it would appear, given the success of a small touring dance show based on a book by the poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen.Sad Book was written in the wake of the sudden death, from meningitis, of Rosen’s 19-year-old son Eddie. Published in 2004, with illustrations by Quentin Blake, it was originally marketed as a children’s book, but its appeal has clearly been much wider and it regularly appears on lists of recommended texts for adults blindsided by grief.In Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer who has helped keep the choreographer’s legacy intact since his death in 1983 and a living link with his teaching. Neary has been working with the RB as a coach, advisor and stager of Balanchine’s work for the past 57 years. “Oh yes!” was her emphatic answer.Neary, who didn’t even hang up her pointe shoes until she was 70, has now decided to spend more time with her husband in Los Angeles. In its new all-Balanchine triple bill, the company shows how thoroughly Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
1965 was a year of change in Britain. It saw the abolition of the death penalty and the arrival of the Race Relations Act. It was the year of the Mary Quant miniskirt and “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. While cinema-goers queued around the block to see The Sound of Music (a critical flop), the Royal Opera House had another kind of hit on its hands. A new three-act ballet closely based on Shakespeare’s text, it presented Romeo and Juliet – in tune with the zeitgeist – as real, impulsive, hormonally charged teenagers. After the curtain, the standing ovation went on for 40 minutes.Sixty Read more ...
theartsdesk
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic team of arts and culture writers went ahead with an ambitious plan – to launch a dedicated internet site devoted to coverage of the UK arts scene.Many of our readers today may have forgotten the arts journalism atmosphere of the first decade of the new century – especially the decimation of traditional broadsheet arts coverage that followed the financial crisis of 2008.Many of the contributors who came together for Read more ...
David Nice
“Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail”. The refrain of Aeschylus’s chorus near the start of the Oresteia is alive and honoured in Henryk Górecki’s rhetoric-free symphonic memorial and Crystal Pite’s response to the dynamism under its seemingly static surface. 44 dancers of all ages, soprano, orchestra and design all work towards a timeless work of art, resonating now but bound to hold up in whatever future remains to us.A confession first: until last night, I’d never heard the Polish composer’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, his Third, in a live performance. The media circus around the Read more ...
Florence Roberts
Imagine: you take your seat at the best restaurant in town, the waiter arrives with a flourish to fill your water glass, you hold it out and he pours. And pours, and pours, and pours and pours. The water spills over the rim and splashes into your lap, down your front, over your head. You are left stunned and sopping wet. It is the most exhilarating evening of your life.This is just one provocation among the myriad short études that make up Vollmond, a late work by Pina Bausch and the latest revival from the company now calling itself Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra – a work he called a cantata but which is more like sung psychodrama – uses the poet Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre to explore the fallout from the character’s disastrous sexual journey. Marrying the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under his spell is toxic. And yet in the mid-1960s his story suggested itself as material for a ballet so luminous and compelling that it has outlived its choreographer by more than half a century.Undaunted by the existence of two famous operatic treatments, John Cranko – then director of Stuttgart Ballet – saw the potential for wordless drama in what was Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Leeds-based Northern Ballet has built a reputation as a source of fine dancers who are also impressive actors. Federico Bonelli, the former Royal Ballet principal who took over its directorship in 2022, is proving a worthy steward of this tradition. The company’s latest visit to London is a triple bill of “shorts’, one almost 50 years old, the other two commissioned by Bonelli. Together they make an extremely satisfying menu.Opening the bill, Rudi Van Dantzig’s 1977 Four Last Songs, to Richard Strauss’s music, is a piece in the same vein as Macmillan’s Song of the Earth, with the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In an ideal world an end-of-year roundup would applaud only new ventures – fresh productions that you may curse for having missed but whose success would almost certainly ensure a second run.The past 12 months in dance has offered few of these. Instead, it was a year of fine revivals. At a time of tightened belts, tightened as never before, it made sense to programme the tried and tested. There were some novelties, of course, but it was the best of the seen-befores that made the bigger splash.The Royal Ballet, flush with its new status as the dominant company at Covent Garden after 80 years Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
No new production of a beloved old ballet can please everyone, and there is none more beloved, or more frequently produced, than The Nutcracker. English National Ballet has staked its identity on performing Tchaikovsky’s last, most hummable and most festive ballet every Christmas since 1950, turning out a fresh reading every few years. This is quite feasible given that so little of the original 1892 production remains (the two pas de deux, the plot outline and the music, basically), leaving everything else up for grabs – a gift for designers and choreographers. The constant is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.As usual with Bourne, the production will have been adjusted slightly with each iteration, but it’s possible to compare the 30th anniversary version with the 1995 one, of which handily there is a DVD. The accumulated tweaks are minor. The giant crown hanging in the Prince’s rooms is now a vibrant scarlet, as is the Queen’s ballgown, popping out of her otherwise black Read more ...