Dance
Jenny Gilbert
People often ask why it is that in ballet there are different casts on different nights, a practice alien to opera, musicals and theatre. The most obvious reason is practical. Ballet companies keep a number of principal dancers on salary who need regularly to strut their stuff. Another reason is that dancers develop distinct individual qualities – technical, musical and dramatic – which imprint on the works they dance. Add to that the mysterious chemistry of partnering, the capacity of one dancer to bring out the best in another, and you begin to understand why hardcore balletomanes beggar Read more ...
Robert Beale
Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again. Manchester Collective, true to their pioneering and resourceful nature, went one step further. They made films, in collaboration with others, whose viewing could happen in a venue as a kind of event in itself. The result is Dark Days, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Bergen International Festival, the largest curated festival for music and performing arts in the Nordic region, launches on 26 May at 11:30 GMT+1 with an opening ceremony – with free digital access – hosted by trumpet player Tine Thing Helseth.The opening programme, The American Moth, anchors this year’s theme “This is America?” The international co-production by Alan Lucien Øyen and his company winter guests is a hybrid, multi-medial performance combining dance, theatre in multiple languages, and cinematic live video.Other highlights of American culture include the 2021 Festival Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Opera House wasn't taking any chances when it welcomed its first ballet audience since December this week. There was no printed programme on offer, nor even a cast sheet. “Not till October” said the uniformed man on the door. Some ballet companies have learnt the hard way not to trust that newly lifted lockdowns (lockups?) will stay that way for long. They’re in no hurry to spend time and money on printed material that might end up having to be pulped.The programming felt confident though. The soft option for the Royal Ballet’s comeback would have been a comforting classic, but Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
You could hardly call this back to normal at London’s premier dance house. For a start, there was too much red plush visible in the stalls, not all of it the result of COVID-safe spacing. There were prefatory onstage speeches and a filmed thank you from Tamaro Rojo, the artistic director who must have suffered a thousand deaths over the past year – at least up to the point English National Ballet was singled out to receive £3 million from the government’s Culture Recovery Fund. Applause and cheers erupted at every mention of dancers or musicians or those more often under-thanked technicians, Read more ...
New York City Ballet 2021 Spring Gala online review - Balanchine and Robbins shine in a dark theatre
Jenny Gilbert
It’s official. Masks are coming off across America while theatres remain dark. Over here, theatres are about to re-open and masks must be worn. An identical situation gives rise to different responses prompted by local preoccupations. Local preoccupations are at work in ballet too. Witness the 2021 Spring Gala performance put out digitally by New York City Ballet. Nothing says NYCB like the mid-20th-century choreography of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. And nothing says NYCB like having Chanel sponsor your first-ever digital Spring Gala, and a Hollywood name direct it.Happy to relate, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Like the British high street, the once richly diverse landscape of dance in the UK is likely to look very different once lockdown is fully lifted. There will be losses, noticeably among the smaller companies whose survival was always precarious. There will be downsizings. There will be painful gaps where a major talent has given up the fight, retired to run a flower shop or become a hill farmer. It will take years for the sector to recover.All the performing arts have taken a hammering, and heaven knows this isn’t a competition, but dance, and ballet especially, is a case apart. The technique Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Hard as it is to recall how it felt to sit elbow to elbow in a red plush seat, plenty of us did that during the first 10 weeks of 2020, with no heed at all to who might be breathing over us. I have since wondered what proportion of the dance sector had any inkling of the wrecking ball that was about to hit. None, to judge by the many weeks it took for dance companies and theatres to reinvent themselves online, and to start dredging their archives for decently recorded material. The flush of early streamings, generously put out for free, were reminders of what we were missing, but no Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If dance lovers have learnt anything in recent months it's to take nothing for granted. How could we ever have been so blasé about The Nutcracker, whose annual reappearance in multiple productions was as inevitable as crowds on Oxford Street? As a long-departed dance critic once Eeyorishly observed, each year “brings us one Nutcracker closer to death”, a quip that now has a bleaker resonance than even he can have intended.In 2020, productions of Tchaikovsky’s evergreen two-act ballet were planned by almost all the UK’s ballet companies, but only a smattering of performances took place before Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Theatres are currently banned from moving scenery and props about on stage and you might expect this to present a major obstacle to a production of The Seven Deadly Sins. How else is the opera’s protagonist to be seen to visit seven American cities, succumbing to a different sin in each? But Opera North’s version of Kurt Weill’s 1933 “sung ballet”, in a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s libretto, a new orchestration for 15 players and with new choreography by director Gary Clarke, has found unlikely inspiration in the restrictions. Even the safe-distancing of cast and orchestra is made to Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Unfazed by yet another forced cancellation, the Royal Ballet has notched up a small triumph over the virus. When what was to have been a performance to a live audience in the Opera House fell prey to new restrictions, it went ahead anyway. With safety protocols for the dancers and orchestra already in place, as well as plans for filming, the only difference was that the public didn’t have to turn out in the rain. And with a single £10 ticket covering everyone around the TV, what a bargain that has turned out to be.For a start, there is the sheer variety of a programme that includes little- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It was a night of multiple firsts: the first live performance at Sadler's Wells in seven months (the place hasn’t been dark for so long since the War); the official first day of Carlos Acosta’s tenure as the new director of Birmingham Royal Ballet; and the premiere of his first company commission – an ambitious piece involving live orchestra, 12 dancers and a sorcerer’s handbook of visual effects. It was also, on a note rather less positive, the first time in its history that Sadler’s Wells is likely to have considered a 30 per cent house to be a roaring success.Like the Royal Ballet a Read more ...