ballet
Ismene Brown
The annual tradition that is the Royal Ballet School Matinee at Covent Garden isn’t just some prestige indulgence for the nervous parents of ballet children fortunate enough to survive the militaristic training and dogged enough to want to continue into the beckoning career where there are such frail job prospects. It is a place where the gap between a good student and a potential artist comes clear through the sheer size and one-offness of the occasion.That’s a big stage to conquer, a stage of dreams and fame, where Fonteyn and Seymour danced, where Guillem and Bussell and Dowell lit fires Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Before Covent Garden's performance of Manon the other day, I had always presumed I'd rather have my eyes out than listen to an entire opera by Massenet. How wrong I was. This Saturday I hope to be proved wrong again, when my colleague on theartsdesk David Nice will attempt to open my ears to another great French worshipper of the pretty in music, the first true master of ballet music before Tchaikovsky, Léo Delibes - whose music I've been even more studious in avoiding.David has spent the last three weeks listening to different versions of the complete ballet of Coppélia for this week's Read more ...
fisun.guner
The gallery has been turned into a little girl’s dressing-up closet. The walls are painted midnight blue and dusted with glitter. Ballet shoes, made for small feet, and a discarded tutu are to be found in a decorous pile on the floor. There are shiny trinkets and princessy things and pictures of ballerinas in bright, pastel shades. And miniature cabinets, almost empty but for one or two small objects – old, discardable things that might be hoarded away as treasures by a child wrapped up in its own imaginary world.I’m not quite sure what Joseph Cornell would have made of all this – his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hans van Manen does basic instincts in ballet better than anyone alive. The Dutch choreographer, nearly 78 and far too little exposed in Britain, is a near-contemporary of Kenneth MacMillan, another specialist in sexual relations, but where MacMillan is fascinatingly drenched in guilt, Van Manen takes a bold, guilt-free stand. Grosse Fuge, which Birmingham Royal Ballet revived in the Hippodrome last night in a smart triple bill to entertain all tastes, is all about mating display - four men in black oriental skirts and big-buckled belts, four women in beige Playtex-type corsets that give Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Within two bars of the overture starting, the first flashes could be seen. English National Ballet’s arena Swan Lake at the Albert Hall - they make no bones about it now - is intended for people who rarely go to the ballet. Actually it is in many cases for people who have no compunction about talking and taking pictures through the ballet quite routinely.The most eyecatching movement to be seen last night from my stalls seat was the constant toing-and-froing of ushers throughout the performance to reprimand members of the audience for holding up their damn mobiles in video mode, bold as you Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A second coming for Michael Clark's recent Barbican commission Come, Been, Gone. Eight months after the London premiere (on which I opined unenthusiastically below last October), he has added another 20 minutes of choreography, they said, with new costumes and artworks. The revision is also now artfully retitled Come, Been and Gone. Not comma-Gone. And Gone. Makes all the difference. Furthermore, note the following revisions to the individual section names: the original "Come" is now entitled "Been", "Been" has actually gone, and been replaced by a new "Come" (that’s the inserted part) while Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
What is going on at New York City Ballet, home of the abstract, neo-classical, pared-down, no-scenery, no-story, nothing-extraneous aesthetic that George Balanchine made into an artistic religion? So far, three out of the four pieces commissioned for the company’s ambitious “Architecture of Dance” festival have been - more or less - story ballets (only Wayne McGregor has resisted the lure). Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna offered a dizzying whirl through a faux-19th-century ballet, complete with mystifying characters, impossible plot and glorious choreography. Of Benjamin Millepied’s why am I not Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
In the New York City Ballet’s grand tradition of ambitious festivals of new work, its current offering, Architecture of Dance, is a big, ambitious deal: seven new ballets; four of them to commissioned scores; five sporting sets by the famed architect Santiago Calatrava. Three of the works are by the men who are arguably the most exciting ballet-makers in the world right now: Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. In New York, the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer McGregor is the least-known of that trio - this is his first commission for an American company, and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Johan Persson took the photographs for The Royal Ballet's world premiere of Liam Scarlett's Asphodel Meadows, which opened on 5 May 2010. Read theartsdesk's review of the ballet here.The music is Francis Poulenc's 1932 Concerto for Two Pianos; design is by John Macfarlane, and lighting by Jennifer Tipton. The Royal Opera House Orchestra was conducted by Barry Wordsworth, with pianists Robert Clark and Kate Shipway.Click on a photo to enter the full view and slideshow.[bg|/johanpersson/asphodel_meadows]Opening tableau: Marianela Nuñez, Tamara Rojo and Laura MoreraArtists of The Royal Ballet: Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Society for Theatre Research’s book of the year award has been won by ballet critic Jann Parry for Different Drummer, her biography of the Royal Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. The book was chosen this morning in a tight finish at the post above Susie Gilbert’s Opera for Everybody: the Story of English National Opera, Andrew Stott’s The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography by Thomas Postlewait and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by Richard Dutton (Oxford University Press). Sheila Hancock presented the accolade Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s eclectic selection of new releases includes offbeat performances of Berlioz and Mahler, a neglected masterpiece by Swiss composer Frank Martin, Bach performed in two contrasting styles, Schubert piano music, a Roussel symphony and an intriguing disc of orchestral music by a young French composer. We also have music composed by the former keyboard player of Deep Purple, Brahms’s German Requiem, a pair of rare Stravinsky ballets and a wonderful new set of Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos. Earlier delights are provided by a selection of motets sung by a renowned countertenor Read more ...
james.woodall
If you're going to dance before the future King of England, and your company bears his family's crest, you'd better dance well. No one could really be in any doubt that the Royal Ballet would put on a grand show with its new revival of Frederick Ashton's 1960 La Fille mal gardée; but it was only at the end, when a shimmering cast in this always shimmering production took its bow with emphatic gestures to a box up on the right, that some of us in the audience realised who'd been watching [wrote James Woodall on 10 March. Ismene Brown reviews a second cast below.]Prince Charles and his wife are Read more ...