Dance
judith.flanders
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of a production to dance; and good because, well, they’re good in it.The first night cast of Jenna Roberts (right, in a previous performance, as the Lilac Fairy), now happily settled back at full health after a long injury break, and Iain Mackay (below left) is as sleek and smooth and elegant as the production. Roberts’s Aurora is gracious Read more ...
judith.flanders
Is David Bintley the one that got away, the wrong turning the Royal Ballet took in the early 1990s? I have long thought so, and watching their current triple bill, the feeling only grows. Bintley trained at the Royal Ballet School, graduated into Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham Royal Ballet), and became house choreographer for the Royal in 1985.Then, in 1993, he fled. Two years later he took over at BRB, and the man who should, probably, have steered Britain’s premiere classical company for the next quarter-century has instead quietly, and productively, guided their second, sister company in Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Some choreographers get turned on by stories; others by music; yet others by the unpredictable magic of rehearsal room chemistry between dancers. Wayne McGregor, the shaven-headed, lanky, black clad superstar of British contemporary ballet, apparently needs a few research scientists, and a question philosophers have been trying to answer for three thousand years: what is a body?This is the question heading up the programme notes for Atomos, the new piece by McGregor and Random Dance which had its world premiere at Sadler’s Wells last night. Helping McGregor and his dancers to answer it Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The ballerina Sylvie Guillem was always out on a limb, even when she was the classical star at the Royal Ballet in the '90s and early '00s. She was French, she was tall, she was unbelievably flexible, she was staggeringly charismatic, and she had no fear of setting her terms and saying “non” if they didn’t suit.She’s always made great media copy, but it’s inevitable that the story on which The Culture Show pegged its half-hour profile is - given that she’s 48 - the usual omen, “As she faces retirement”. The irony is that Guillem has such a phenomenally handy physique that she could well just Read more ...
judith.flanders
The opening night of the autumn season brings a gala first night, Carlos Acosta’s staging of Petipa’s Hispano-Russo-Austro-Hungarische castanet-fest, Don Quixote, with starry leads (Marianela Nuñez and Acosta himself), a very obviously expensive new production courtesy of West End musical designer Tim Hatley (Shrek and Spamalot), and an amped-up re-orchestrated score from conductor Martin Yates.Acosta (pictured below by Johan Persson) has previously mounted shows of his own – Tocororo, A Cuban Tale was the most prominent – but Don Q is his first outing in the classical repertoire, and for the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet are a lot like the city they hail from. Like New York, they are bold, zingy, multicultural and they move with an irrepressible energy.But they are a serious company, accomplished and highly technical, constantly striving to improve their credentials. Collecting the best European choreographic commission to add to their repertoire, Cedar Lake have previously worked with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Hofesh Shechter, Angelin Preljocaj, Didy Veldman and Ohad Naharin to name but a few.Jiri Kylian’s opener, Indigo Rose, sets the precedent of tonight’s performance – an Read more ...
mark.kidel
The rich cocktail of sex, bestiality and possession that lies at the heart of the vampire myth is a perennial crowd-pleaser, a surefire frightener set in an all-too-familiar discomfort zone. Mark Bruce’s rich and reference-laden take on Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic presents a Transylvanian count who is both Everyman and Other. There is something of the passionate bloodsucker in every moment that each of us surrenders to the darkest and most lustful animal forces that lurk beneath the veneer of civility. Bruce’s powerful new piece of dance theatre playfully explores this notion of the inner Read more ...
Sarah Kent
While the main gallery is closed for renovation, the Wellcome Collection has taken the opportunity to mount a fascinating upstairs show exploring the way choreographer Wayne McGregor collaborates with scientists.A timeline charting McGregor’s career reveals that it all started back in 1997 when he attended the opening of the Inter Communication Centre in Tokyo and learned that, with their brains wired up to scanners, two people could activate a toy car by accidentally thinking of the same number. This sparked an enduring fascination with the mind and how it acts upon, and interacts with, the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here's an association test - what's next in the sequence: flamenco, gypsy, soul? Yes, you win the free tourist trip to Andalucía along with writer Elizabeth Kinder, with whom you will almost certainly enjoy weak sangria and tapas while stumbling amusingly in bad Spanish, and you won't be troubled by a single unfamiliar thought about this alluring form of dance, music and poetic song.Flamenco is so hackneyed a part of the Spanish package that it's certainly time to chisel through the candy to seek the bitter heart of the real thing. But there's always something hokum when a presenter declares Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi left it till last to be most itself, to dance a ballet that is truly of its blood, its seed - its closing on Alexei Ratmansky's The Flames of Paris will leave much happiness in the memory to override the problematic productions of classics, the unidiomatic Balanchine and the awful backstage events. Here at last, in a work by the most gifted of recent Bolshoi directors, you met on stage young people who dance, who act, who love the theatre, fresh in their performing, skilled in their means, open-hearted in reaching the audience, and loved right back.The previous night the visiting Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Flames of Paris, given its London premiere by the Bolshoi Ballet this weekend, was Alexei Ratmansky's farewell present to the Moscow company which he directed from 2004 to 2008. In his final months at the Bolshoi he talked with me in his office about his approach to revising this landmark historical ballet, and the conditions inside the theatre that he would soon be leaving after a turbulent five years.He had been only 36 when he was invited - out of the blue - by the Bolshoi Theatre's general director Anatoly Iksanov to lead the great, but stagnating Moscow flagship into a new sense of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For their first visit to the UK, Shanghai Ballet have brought a narrative ballet based on a Chinese theatrical version of Jane Eyre. It focuses on Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s mad wife in the attic, whose fate has often troubled readers, though the Shanghai narrative does not ask about the economic and social conditions of exploitation, the colonialism and sexism that have trapped her.Instead it presents Bertha, Jane and Rochester as three troubled souls in a kind of eternal love triangle. But Charlotte Brontë's classic is not a novel about a timeless dilemma, it is about a specific character Read more ...