Dance
David Nice
Christopher Wheeldon’s hard-working mix of skewed classical ballet, vaudeville and Victorian theatrical magic achieved through state-of-the-art technique wasn’t much liked by theartsdesk’s critics on its first and second outings. Marvelling at it on DVD as I worked on the notes for that release, I wondered why. Now it’s clearer that many of the special effects and characterisations work best in close up. But for all that it’s an inventive if overlong entertainment, its occasional treacle quotient fine for seasonal cheer.You’ll get your money's worth simply from the wonders of Bob Crowley, a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There is a special poignancy to these performances of Sacred Monsters, Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan's terrific 2006 joint show. Guillem, the former Paris Opéra étoile and Royal Ballet prima ballerina whose singular talent has lit up contemporary dance for the last decade, announced in October that she will be retiring from the stage for good in 2015. Sitting in Sadler's Wells last night I was achingly conscious not only that this was probably the last time I would see Sacred Monsters, but also one of the now vanishingly small number of opportunities left ever to watch Guillem, one of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The 1871 ballet that goes by the name of Don Quixote has always been a challenge to stage. Barely a tenth of its two hours-plus concerns the titular knight and his crackpot wanderings. The rest is fixed like a town hall security camera on the non-events of a square in Barcelona, where a flighty barmaid and a feckless barber fall in and out of love every few seconds while the townspeople stand about and watch.Typically, Russian productions are happy to overlook this narrative snag to focus all on the choreographic fireworks; others tie themselves in knots trying to fashion some semblance of a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
How long should a dance programme be? Opera and theatre habitués can be surprised by outings to contemporary dance, where the pieces might be shorter than the intervals, and a 7:30 start could see you comfortably on the 9:15 train home. But the early train is in no danger from Rambert’s new programme, their annual showcase of contemporary creations at Sadler’s Wells, which features one world première, one London première, and one revival from this time last year, and last night came in at a handsome two and a half hours.Ashley Page, former Director of Scottish Ballet, is a good choreographer Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Were it not for William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, the vocal and instrumental ensemble he started in Paris in the 1970s, the beauties of the musical French Baroque might have remained a dusty fact of pre-Revolutionary history. As it is, there is barely a singer, player or conductor now performing Lully, Couperin, Rameau, Charpentier et al who has not benefited from the life’s work of this diligent conductor-musicologist. Through him, their arts are indeed flourishing.So a one-off concert at the Barbican, part of a Europe-wide tour to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I am picturing a scene in BBC4’s highly fortified underground headquarters, a conversation between its mastermind-in-chief and a hapless minion. “What do we do well, Stanley?” “History documentaries, boss.” “And what do people, according to the immutable proofs furnished by viewing figures, actually like?” “Ballroom dancing programmes, boss. Costume dramas. And unashamedly populist, good-looking young historians.” “Correct, Stanley. So waltz yourself over to the phone to get Len Goodman and Lucy Worsley to do us a three-part series on the history of ballroom dancing. I want Len in Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
English National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet have staged programmes of war pieces already this year; now here's the Royal Ballet bringing up the rear in its own inimitable (and rather oblique) fashion with a triple bill that picks up on and subtly plays with the anxiety felt by those great British artists, Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, in the 1930s and 1940s. Brandstrup's Ceremony of Innocence, first performed at last year's Aldeburgh Festival and set to Britten's 1937 Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, promised much, but for my money didn't deliver. With a Britten score, a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It is no exaggeration to say that Lloyd Newson has created a new theatrical language. Verbatim drama and intricate choreography would seem, on paper, to be fatally competing elements, yet Newson’s hypnotic fusion charges both word and movement with fresh meaning. Critically, the dance element of this typically confrontational new work from his company DV8, covering such harrowing topics as domestic violence, rape, incest, addiction and criminality, prevents it from slipping into hackneyed territory. A potential sob story with sermonising framework is reborn as an extraordinarily personal Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When you're talking about dancers, the old adage about genius being 99% perspiration has a point. You have to work damned hard just to be average in professional dance; to be good, like Akram Khan and Israel Galván are good, takes sweat (and tears and blood, like as not). Still, all the perspiration in the world won't avail if you don't have that 1% of inspiration, a little blue flame of a pilot light in your soul, ready to spark the gas jets of hard work into fiery life, rather than just a lot of hot air.This show works because Khan and Galván are inspired. The premise is pretty simple: let' Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The challenge was already in the title for me: as both a dance critic and a strongly visual person, in the normal order of things I see the dance first and hear the music second. Last night's show, the second of the Sadler's Wells Composer Series of productions (the first was with Mark-Anthony Turnage in 2011), set out to challenge that order of perception by marrying dance and music in a partnership of equals: the formidable musical heft of Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia on the one hand, and on the other dance works by four major contemporary choreographers, including new commissions Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Madness is a favourite trope of opera, less so of ballet. There’s Giselle, but her insanity lasts only a few minutes. There’s Kenneth MacMillan’s delusional Anastasia, who believes she's the daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, but the advent of DNA testing destroyed the story’s credibility. In his Mayerling, Prince Rudolf’s drug habit muddies the waters, likewise the brown ooze in Arthur Pita’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It takes a brave choreographer to tackle mental illness head-on, not least when it's his first full-evening commission for the Royal Ballet.And there’s Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Akram Khan is unexpectedly softly-spoken. Acknowledged as a truly great dancer, he's a master of the classical Indian Kathak form that he trained in, and also supremely gifted at blending it with other movement vocabularies to create a personal signature style of elemental force, He creates hypnotic worlds in his pieces, with the kind of magnetic stage presence that draws you in so completely, you're often a little amazed, when the curtain drops, to find yourself still a perfectly ordinary human being sitting in theatre seat. Somehow, I expected this aura and gravitas to be matched by Read more ...