Dance
Jenny Gilbert
When flamenco first came out of the shadows and started to fill big theatres, it was like something out of a historical pageant. The shows that played London in the early 1990s harked back to an imagined gypsy past where old men hammered rhythms on blacksmiths’ anvils and women swirled extravagant frills. The crudely amplified music lost much of its detail but audiences lapped it up anyway. Since then theatrical flamenco has come a long way, dropping the campfire shtick and investing in designer threads and sound design. Leading the charge has been Sara Baras, now 52, who first came to notice Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Is it a cop-out for an artist to label a piece of work “Untitled”? Painters and sculptors make a habit of it, reasoning that they want to leave the viewer free to bring to the experience what they will, unhampered and unlimited by prior information. Odd, then, that dance, being such an ambiguous, free-associating art form, should be so far behind the curve.Wayne McGregor’s latest work for the Royal Ballet is the first “Untitled” that I have come across in three decades of watching dance. It is also one of the most exciting new non-narrative ballets in years.Untitled, 2023 is named after the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Innovation is always a risky business. Opera North’s vision and ambition for this production is to create, in effect, a new genre: a combination of staged choral-orchestral performance with contemporary dance.Partnership and diversity are the buzz words – good ones, too – and the concept brings together the opera company’s soloists, chorus and orchestra with dancers from both Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Theatre and South Africa’s Jazzart Dance Theatre, plus some help from Capetown Opera.The link here is choreographer Dane Hurst, until recently artistic director of Phoenix and now its artistic Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The timing was impeccable, though almost certainly accidental. As protesters lay prostrate in The Mall in a mass “die-in” on the day designated as Earth Day, and as many thousands more urged action against climate change outside the Houses of Parliament, Nederlands Dans Theater was giving its final London performance of a powerful new ballet called Figures in Extinction [1.0].A first-time collaboration between the globally hot choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité's Simon McBurney, it presented a chilling catalogue of some of the plant and animal species, glaciers and rivers that are Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As any archaeologist knows, digging up a sarcophagus is a nailbiting business. How small are the chances that inside the shredded linen wrappings will lie a recognisable body with some vestiges of its former life upon it?Enough DNA and bone to reconstruct the person's age, state of health, status – perhaps even enough detail on the face to bring the dead features back to life and a guess at personality? Properly mummified, a human body can yield an extraordinary amount of living information after thousands of years. But ballets vanish far quicker.Stop performing a ballet for a decade and a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Akram Khan Company promises “a magical dance-theatre retelling of Kipling’s classic”, and that’s more or less what you get. The choreography is striking and inventive, the dancing and staging superb.What work less well is the overall tone, which, for a piece that announces it is aimed at the world’s children as well as its adults, is pretty dark and doom-laden (there is no guidance here of its suitability for younger age groups), then veers towards levity, as if to balance out the gloom.Most older children, of course, won't be fazed by this bleak vision and don’t need telling that the planet Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The urge to redesign a heritage ballet is a curious one, given not just the expense but the fact that the main draw of an old ballet is the steps and the music, which stay the same whatever the stage dressing. The Royal Ballet was keen, however, to mark the 75th anniversary of Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella with a new look, and apparently found no shortage of private sponsors who felt the same. This was after all the first three-act ballet to be made in Britain, and had been out of the repertory for a decade. So Cinderella, a story about transformation, has itself been transformed, most Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
With all the talk – and, frankly, fear – around AI and the increasing dominance of the digital world, it’s fascinating to see what dance has to say about it.Although choreographers have been playing with avatars and movement sensors for a couple of decades now (Merce Cunningham and Wayne McGregor come to mind), Tom Dale is something of a rarity in setting his entire focus on digital interaction, seeking out specialists in digital projection and digitally generated music to collaborate with on equal terms. And while one always hesitates to proclaim the novelty of anything, still less a new art Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a critic, I’ve rarely felt compelled to mourn publicly about an artist. Mourning goes somewhere beyond the usual sense of loss and gratitude when someone's death has been announced. But it's the only word when the departed is one of the very few individuals - or their songs or books or pictures - who get in your bloodstream, who get into your optic nerves or your inner ear, who magnify and sharpen your experience of being alive.Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
She can do anything. That’s what choreographers say about Tiler Peck, the peppy New York City Ballet principal who has launched a stream of projects above and beyond the day job. You want speed? Wham, you get it. You want complexity? She can learn a tricky phrase in seconds then reverse it and riff on it. You want nerve, verve, musicality? Those choreographers are right, this dynamo has it all.Too bad Sadler’s Wells couldn’t schedule more than three performances of Turn It Out with Tiler Peck, her British debut as a solo operator. Perhaps no one quite believed the name would carry enough Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The more Wayne McGregor’s superb Woolf Works is staged, the richer it seems to become. It has started a third run at Covent Garden since its premiere there in 2015, which, considering the house lost over a year of performances, is some achievement. It is the mark of an instant modern classic.The evening begins with the crystal-clear clipped tones of Virginia Woolf herself, recorded by the BBC in 1937, reading from her essay On Craftsmanship. It’s an uncanny start, like being lectured by a ghost. The essay considers the writer’s use of words, and decides new coinages won’t work with an “old” Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Soweto-born dancer-choreographer Dada Masilo has made her name telling classic European stories in African dialect. The last piece she toured in the UK was a striking Giselle in which the avenging Wilis were not undead brides but ancestral spirits led by a witch doctor. In his hand, instead of the traditional myrtle branch, symbol of chastity, he carried a fly whisk.Her latest project is based on The Rite of Spring, clearly inspired by the atavistic 1970s version by Pina Bausch rather than the Russian original and its focus on the violent annual thaw. South Africa's winters being Read more ...