Dance
Hanna Weibye
The run of Giselle that opened at the Royal Opera House last night was completely sold out before it even started, and no wonder. Pair Sir Peter Wright's eerie production with some very fine casts and the reliable classiness of the Royal Ballet's corps de ballet and you have an enchanting package indeed.Last night's Giselle was Marinela Nuñez, impeccable in every respect, but particularly charming as the merry, hopeful peasant girl of the first scenes (pictured below), and the loving spirit of the second act (the mad scene does not come quite so easily to this naturally sunny ballerina). The Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The unifying theme of this new Coliseum double bill is death, but don’t let that put you off. Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth and August Bournonville’s La Sylphide may seem like odd bedfellows, but both are a great deal more uplifting than their plot summaries might suggest, and in the hands of English National Ballet the evening is joyous, even life-affirming.MacMillan’s Song of the Earth was acquired by the company for its part in the national MacMillan anniversary celebrations last October, and they look at home in it already. Song’s combination of sincerity and levity is a natural Read more ...
theartsdesk
With forelock-tugging celebrations of a choreographer who died 25 years ago and a summer visit by the Mariinsky the highest-profile events in the calendar, 2017 may not be remembered as a vintage year for British dance. But there were striking moments aplenty if you knew where to look for them, and companies, directors and dancers making magic even in ordinary circumstances. As the year ends, theartsdesk correspondents cast their minds back and pick out the best of those magical moments. As always, the criterion is memorability: this is not a comprehensive review of who was worthy or Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Even if Matthew Bourne were never to choreograph another step, he could fill theatres in perpetuity by rotating old stock. Cinderella, made in 1997, was the follow-up to his break-out hit Swan Lake but, never quite happy with it, he reworked it in 2010, replacing the musicians in the pit with a custom-made recording of an 82-piece orchestra. It’s this version that now appears, slated to follow its London dates with an exhaustive UK tour. At least now no-one in Milton Keynes or Sheffield can complain that the regions are shortchanged by getting piped music. Everyone is. Elevated to the status Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The familiar doesn’t have to get old. Last night at the Coliseum there were children in the boxes, adults in the circle and grandparents in the stalls. Seasonal favourite Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker brings all ages to the ballet — as well as each audience member's inner child, and this year's revival by English National Ballet is no exception.The magic begins with Peter Farmer’s designs. Snow falls in gusts as guests arrive to the party by skating across a frozen lake; the interior of the house is festooned with lavish drapery which makes the most of the space’s depth and later warps Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Nureyev, the most notorious new production at the Bolshoi Ballet’s modern history, premiered last night in Moscow to a 15-minute standing ovation and exclamations of official approval even by Putin’s press secretary – but the ballet’s creator and director languished under house arrest, refused permission to see his own ballet. Members of the creative team took the curtain calls at the great colonnaded theatre by the Kremlin wearing T-shirts with the face of Kirill Serebrennikov on them, while spectators chanted “Kirill! Kirill!”, according to news reports.Serebrennikov, a leading figure in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
For some people, the festive season starts with The Nutcracker. And as it happens, this year the opening night of Sir Peter Wright’s production for the Royal Ballet was also the performance beamed live to hundreds of cinemas around the UK and many more around the world. There’s confidence for you. A global relay on the first night without so much as an edit button.But then, these dancers are in their comfort zone in this particular show, which exploits all the things the Royal is best at: naturalistic drama combined with a coolly restrained classicism, and a sense (however carefully Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
On paper, the appeal of a Sylvia revival is questionable. If even the choreographer (Frederick Ashton) wasn't sure his 1952 original was worth saving for posterity, do we really want to watch a 2004 reconstruction posthumously pieced together from rehearsal tapes? Especially given that, with its arcadian setting, it totters delicately on the dividing line between delightfully arch and camp as the Queen Mother's curtains? Happily I can report, after last night's performance by the Royal Ballet, that this revival comes down on the right side of the line, and is absolutely worth your time.Sylvia Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of all the stories Arthur Pita could have chosen to wrangle for his new narrative ballet, he chose one about wind, perhaps the trickiest element of all to represent on a live stage. Tricky because of course you can’t see wind, you can only see its effects. Tricky, too, because – in extremis, as this is – it does mad things to hair-dos, costumes, and the ability of the cast to keep a grip on props and even dance the steps. But it’s precisely that craziness that gives Pita’s first main-stage commission for the Royal Ballet – accorded the prime central spot in a contemporary mixed bill – its Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was a man of many modes and moods, and it’s tempting to wonder how many more he might have revealed had he not been felled by a heart attack at the age of 62. Two retrospective programmes staged this week – continuing a short season marking the 25th anniversary of his death – show him by turns at his most majestic, most profound, most frivolous and most confrontational. The “difficult” ballet – his last, The Judas Tree, an allegory featuring hideous sexual violence, a lynching and a suicide – straddles both bills in a piece of brave programming that doesn’t Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If there were an arts award for loyalty, the Barbican Theatre would surely win it for having kept faith with Michael Clark. It’s no secret that the bad-boy image that has clung to Clark since his punk extravaganzas in the 1980s had consequences in his personal and creative life, forcing frequent "early retirements". But the Barbican, along with the Dance Umbrella festival that helped produce his work, kept on believing, and this time last year that belief was rewarded in a knockout triptych of new work sparked in part by the passing of David Bowie. “Fabulous, but too short!” was the general Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are different ways of celebrating a great artist’s legacy, and I suppose they have to coexist. One approach is raptly to admire his or her acknowledged masterpieces, the equivalent of making straight for Guernica or the Mona Lisa. The other approach is to delve in the archives and pull out the fragments and sketches, the early cartoons and the late pastels, and scrutinise them for evidence of the genius at work. The decision to try and recover a lost MacMillan ballet, Le Baiser de la Fée, for this Royal Opera House season marking the 25th anniversary of the choreographer’s death smacks Read more ...