Dance
Aaron Wright
Since its inception in 1997 Fierce, Birmingham’s International Festival of Live Art & Performance, has championed the work of performance makers not often seen in Britain. The pantheon of body artists under Mark Ball’s era as director included the likes of Franko B, Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly. Under the helm of previous director duo Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison came experimental European choreographers and theatre-makers such as Eva Meyer-Keller, Kate McIntosh and Lundahl & Seitl. Many of these artists have made significant contributions to the art form but for some reason Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Northern Ballet do a challenging job really well: on a mid-scale touring company budget and doing all the things mid-scale touring companies have to do (tour, obviously, but also outreach and audience-building and Christmas ballets for children), they manage to create a constant stream of new work, and have built up a real competence in storytelling on stage. But what they don't get to do is perform the greats of the classical ballet repertoire, either 19th or 20th century. Those have demands all their own, and Northern's dancers don't have the chance to work familiarity with those demands Read more ...
theartsdesk
At a festive ceremony on Tuesday night at The Hospital Club in central London, the winners were announced for this year's h.Club 100 Awards. The distinguished broacaster John Simpson (pictured below) gave an impassioned keynote address about the value of the UK's creative industries which concluded with amusing advice on the wisdom of eating kedgeree. The comedian Stuart Goldsmith compered with wit, flair and sangfroid. The undoubted star of the night was Lady Leshurr, who accepted her award in the Music category - presented to her by theartsdesk's Thomas H. Green - with a speech that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I can imagine Monica Mason, the artistic director who commissioned Christopher Wheeldon's 2011 Alice, feeling pretty pleased with herself as she looked around the Covent Garden auditorium last night at an audience buzzing with excitement for the first performance of the new season. At its 2011 premiere the piece was a big step into the unknown, the Royal Ballet's first full-length new work in 16 years. Now on its fifth run, Alice has proved to be the company's most successful new story ballet in a good deal longer than that.Alice paved the way for a run of new full-length ballets: three more Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of the many good reasons for seeing Akram Khan’s 2016 remake of Giselle – his work is often a headline event, for one – the most compelling is the company performing it. English National Ballet used to be the poor relation of its plusher sister national flagship in WC2. Not any more. Under the leadership of the fabulous Tamara Rojo (formerly a major attraction at that plush national flagship) it has been transformed from a troupe of also-rans into a company of demons."Demonic" is the only word for the ferocious energy and precision with which ENB’s dancers deliver Khan's extraordinary feat of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are half as many performances of La Bayadère in this Mariinsky tour as performances of Swan Lake (four vs eight). The preponderance of Swan Lake is driven by audience demand, but if audiences knew what was good for them, they'd demand more Bayadère: this lavish, thrilling production catches the spirit of the Mariinsky far better than their rather pallid Swan Lake. And, as the audience at the Royal Opera House last night will attest alongside me, it's a fabulous, satisfying evening at the ballet.If you want to see ballet mime done competently, look to the Mariinsky Bayadère. Several Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are two approaches to a triple bill: make all three pieces similar so you get one crowd with definite tastes, or make them very different so you have a chance of pleasing everyone. The Contrasts bill that the Mariinsky ballet showed at the Royal Opera House was, as its title suggests, firmly in the latter camp. Its three pieces spanned over a hundred years of ballet history, from the Imperial classic Paquita via a stylised 1960s Carmen all the way to Wayne McGregor's 2008 Infra.Carmen was created as a vehicle for Maya Plisetskaya, the great Soviet ballerina who died in 2015, and it Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It's a Cinderella story: Xander Parish was plucked from obscurity in the Royal Ballet corps and trained by the Mariinsky to dance the greatest roles in the repertoire. Now, not only is he the first Briton to join the historic Russian company, he has also just been promoted to Principal after last night's performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House.To make the move on his home turf like this seems like the crowning move in a canny publicity campaign that has seen Parish in newspaper interviews and on the Today Programme in recent weeks. The hype around him has been carefully built over a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the most Russian things you can do in ballet is dance Don Quixote, which is 100 percent set in Spain. Don't think too hard about it, and definitely don't think too hard about the plot (which is barely there). The point is, the Mariinsky - perhaps the most pedigree ballet company in the world - are back on the Royal Opera House stage, and all ready for Britain's balletomanes to marvel at Russian training and tradition, and to perform the perennial comparison: who is best, Bolshoi or Mariinsky?Viktoria Tereshkina (pictured below right) is a very Mariinsky choice for Kitri: she is trained Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. This year they are teaming up with theartsdesk.com – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to add a brand new award to the line-up.The Young Reviewer Award is aimed at bold, thoughtful young writers aged 18-30 who are serious about a career in arts journalism. It will be presented to the author of the best review of any art-form that we Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Years ago, MC14/22 (Ceci est mon corps), the Angelin Preljoçaj piece with which this Scottish Ballet double bill opens, made a deep impression on Christopher Hampson. So deep that, once he became Artistic Director of Scottish, he actively sought it out for the company, pulling it out of unperformed obscurity to the surprise even of the choreographer, and using an Edinburgh Festival platform to stage a piece that would have been commercially unviable in the normal order of things. Admirable, you might say: artistic conviction fighting back against the creeping infiltration of the utile. Bravo Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th-century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's most remarkable reconstructor has died suddenly, aged only 55. Sergei Vikharev was the passionate pioneer of a brave new movement to install period sensibilities in an artform that had long become the plaything of its performers and coaches rather than its creators, and his death is devastating timing for ballet as well as for his family and Read more ...