ballet
Ismene Brown
In a world crying out for even below-mediocre ballet choreographers (Benjamin Millepied, anyone?), the Dutch old master Hans Van Manen is an extraordinarily well-kept secret. Why a man of such superb balletic accomplishment, theatrical instincts and calligraphic and technical skill remains barely acknowledged in Britain is presumably down to sex. His idea of sexy ballet, that is, being alien to upright British sensibilities.But if it’s a good mind that you’re after in ballet, Van Manen’s is one of the very best, as a long-overdue exhibition of his ballets at Sadler’s Wells this week Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Natalie Portman has always had more light than shade. Even her lapdancing sylph in Closer erred towards the porcelain. Casting her in Black Swan was a calculated risk by Darren Aronofsky. The journey of her prim prima ballerina Nina towards a fatal knowledge of the dark side is mirrored in Portman’s odyssey as an actress in a compelling performance which deservedly won her an Academy Award.You probably need a big screen for all the colours to come out. Portman’s emotional march takes her from demure containment to a kind of orgasmic hallucinatory hysteria, and not just in the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Manon, Manon, the little minx. Here she comes again - for the 223rd time, last night - and like the legendary ladies of her trade, scrubs up fresh and newly captivating, as if she’d only just skipped off the carriage from the convent. MacMillan’s irresistible bad girl and her gullible, innocent lover have become two of the classic roles in all ballet since the 1974 premiere, when reception was far from friendly, and it’s a sign of what a game-changer its choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was that when you go to Manon, what you come out talking about is how well the character drama was spun Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pina Bausch decided: “Words can’t do more than just evoke things - that’s where dance comes in.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Only if they’re bad words and good dance - bad writhing instead of, say, Shakespeare’s words isn’t much of a swap. But with Bausch, people tended to hang on every word, probably because so much of her dance was indeed pretty damn good, and it’s so difficult to put into words just why that was.Part of it was that it was a theatrical expression of adult instincts that we all share, rather than a school of dance that you had to know standards to access. Wim Wenders Read more ...
David Nice
It's just been crowned the BBC Music Magazine Awards' CD of the Year. But is Valery Gergiev's second complete recording of the 20th century's greatest ballet score, captured live at the Barbican for the LSO's own label, right at the top? In my Building a Library survey for BBC Radio 3, condensed in print for the BBCMM, I suggested it might be the best in state-of-the-art sound - but not the finest overall version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. That palm went to Rozhdestvensky's much more impeccably paced old Melodiya version, in mono and dating from 1959.There's enough ravishingly beautiful Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As the young waitress said in the restaurant where we ate after last night’s world premiere of Ashley Page’s Alice in Glasgow, she hadn’t ever been to ballet, but she was tempted to go for this - “It’s Alice after all, isn’t it? Wonderland. I’d love to see Wonderland.” The kind of new audience that any company should kill for.And my friend said, sadly, yes, that’s what we’d also supposed it would be. "So shall I go?" she said. We said, um, you’re right. Ballet is the one place where you really can hope to see Wonderland, the unsayable, the merely imaginable. But there is always the danger Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ninety-nine years ago, there were sights and stars seen upon the ballet stage as had never been dreamed of. A young genius of 32 was the driving engine of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes - the choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who created fantasies of radiant Blue Gods, of murderous and erotic goddesses, and tapestries that came to life and sucked dreamers into them. His stars were to become immortals: Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Ida Rubinstein… the most beautiful divinities of the stage, their names living on.For Nijinsky’s vehicle, Le dieu bleu, the ultimate stage colourist Leon Read more ...
David Nice
Forty years ago, my childhood self wasn't in the least bored by Frederick Ashton's balletic animal magic: I saw it twice in cinemas large and small and asked for the soundtrack LP of John Lanchbery's masterly Victorian-potpourri ballet score for my birthday. If I get a bit restless now, it might be because I want more, which is less, in terms of pace; the best stories here are all in the first half, the picnic finale is interminable and no doubt there's something odd about the mice, the frog, the pigs and the fox ending up together and all the same size. Otherwise it's good to see it Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Arts Council’s rearrangement of the dance world by its handling of its 15 per cent subsidy cut shows no change in its persistence in choosing to prefer bureaucratic structures to talent. The 15 per cent cut has been handed straight over to all the ballet companies, with no evidence of strategic thinking about the implications for numbers of dancers, productions or programming. But it’s in the area of contemporary dance that my first impression is of an urge at HQ to pass the buck of decisions to the regions to handle. Once again the talent, the artists, are much less visible in the pot Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Birmingham is the fount of beauty and magic when it comes to ballet design. Covent Garden - forget it, too much money, too little taste. What illustrates that truism is the comparison that can be made between the Royal Ballet’s cartoony Cinderella production returning to WC2 next week and the magical visual experience that is John Macfarlane’s vision for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s new Cinderella, having its London premiere at the Coliseum this week.Bintley, BRB’s director, is a canny man - he wanted to replace Macfarlane’s stunning Nutcracker for the Birmingham Christmas entertainment. Shock, Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if you’re going to headline yourself in the title of your show "the talent", you’d better have some: audiences aren’t forgiving. William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, ex-Royal Ballet dancers headlining their own company for the last decade, have a history of these pre-emptive strikes – an earlier show was called Critics’ Choice – and they also have a history of living up to them. Fortunately for all, The Talent does too.Trevitt and Nunn, now in their early forties, have retired from dancing and are planning their future as dance master impresarios. They began by holding an open Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Les Grands Ballets Classiques de Stoke Poges are a company waiting to happen for most of us, but for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo a bitter rivalry must be endured - one of their ballerinas didn’t show up last night in High Wycombe, due to winging on a last-minute errand of mercy to the Stoke Poges mob. Fortunately Ida Nevaseyneva was available to totter in with her eternally moulting Dying Swan - and all suddenly became right with the world. The Trocks are an errand of mercy, to anyone who loves old ballet, anyone who loves smart comedy.This all-male US ballet company started Read more ...