ballet
Ismene Brown
They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a mite disappointing. And it strives a great deal higher and with more aim to stimulate than Alan Yentob did in this stock documentary from the BBC's flagship arts strand. Is Yentob the most uninterested specialist presenter on TV?With that morose stare, he's a terrible advert for arts-loving for a start, leaving a chill as he wanders among the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely been held to be the realm of sweetness and majesty. The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan brought the values of modern theatre, cinema and the sexual revolution to ballet, and his narrative daring remains unequalled by any choreographer in Britain after him. In fact, possibly cowed by his mastery in that department, choreographers after him have fled towards abstract and even asexual codes of movement Read more ...
judith.flanders
A new Liam Scarlett ballet has become an event, even as, in this case, Scarlett’s home company, the Royal Ballet, is recreating a work he choreographed last January for Miami City Ballet – the young choreographer’s first international commission.In Viscera, Scarlett continues to pay homage to his choreographic masters – previously he has tipped his hat to Ashton and MacMillan. For Miami, directed for so many decades by George Balanchine’s great muse Edward Villella, he not unnaturally looks to the American genius. His choice of music – a piano concerto by Lowell Liebermann – sets the tone, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hans Werner Henze, the composer who died on Saturday aged 86, wrote the music for one of Margot Fonteyn's signature ballets, Ondine, a ballet about an inhuman spirit who longs to be joined to a man - but when she does, he must die. It might almost be a metaphor for the death of the thought the moment it is realised.A 1958 collaboration with Britain's major choreographer Frederick Ashton, Ondine was the first full-length ballet score to be commissioned by the emerging Royal Ballet, and it was, for the very young, and creatively fluctuating Henze, a process that confirmed his instinct that Read more ...
judith.flanders
The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the Royal Ballet, partnered by Carlos Acosta.Osipova had, dramatically, left the Bolshoi for the smaller and less prestigious Mikhailovsky, to the puzzlement of many. But the Bolshoi streams its dancers: a certain type is classical, another is romantic, another – Osipova’s type – play soubrettes. Her Kitri in Don Quixote (first seen in London in 2007) Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan. Films about the ballet life are rareties - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the curtains and OTT fantasies?Indeed, it’s unusual to see a dance film being made at all, let alone picked for a celebrated indie film festival like Raindance this Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's been eight years since San Francisco Ballet were last here, charming us with their finesse and their smiles - welcome back. They offer a boost of spirit to the gloomsters of ballet over here. This small city which punches many times above its weight in the cultural world owes a vast amount of its self-confidence and charisma to its mixed ethnic roots, so the range of dancers from the Far East via North Europe and the Latino Americas is representative. But only a gifted, purposeful artistic director, which Helgi Tomasson evidently is, can fashion eager youngsters from such varied cultures Read more ...
judith.flanders
A few years ago, the word was that a new choreographer was showing interesting things. His name was Liam Scarlett, and although he was very young, some work that had been seen in a workshop was looking promising. It was not long before “promising” became actuality, and Scarlett’s first piece, Asphodel Meadows (main picture), was premiered on the Opera House stage. Now in Draft Works, an evening of 10 pieces by burgeoning choreographers connected with the Royal Ballet, we once again get a chance to see works-in-progress, to get in on the ground floor and be able, later, to say, “I was there Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here’s a mindboggling statistic. By my calculation, some 330,000 seats are going to be offered for sale in London and Birmingham for just one ballet this Christmas - that’s live seats, not counting the three (yes, three) cinema screenings of foreign Nutcrackers being beamed into the UK on a lot of holiday dates. So the dance industry reckon to sell up to half a million Nutcracker seats mostly in London in a bit over a month?I’m tallying up Royal Ballet (20 performances), Birmingham Royal Ballet (28), English National Ballet (35) and Matthew Bourne (47) live, not to mention New York City Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballet has had a difficult relationship with filming for a long time, not only as regards permissions and copyrights from all the people involved, but also in how to frame and light for film a spectacle and action conceived and judged for the stage, live before an audience of a thousand. Perhaps such things held the Royal Ballet back for decades, while the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov and the Bolshoi energetically set cameras rolling on their great stars and landmark productions.But suddenly it’s all changed and Covent Garden is pouring out ballet DVDs of this generation of dancers, and it’s Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Oh, the joys of eccentricity. Welcome to the Vanderhof family of misfits. The head of the household, Grandpa Martin, refuses to pay any taxes, preferring to keep snakes on a hatstand. Good for frightening off the tax inspector, who unexpectedly drops by.Other members of the three-generational New York family variously make fireworks in the attic, bake strange candy, play Beethoven on the xylophone, produce unrecognisable masks and write unsuccessful melodramas. Daughter Essie moves around the place as a hopeful hopeless ballerina, aided by an explosive Russian teacher, Olga (Maggie O'Brien, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
No more is dance the preserve of the few sitting in the theatre - larger companies are leaping hungrily for TV and now cinema screens, having found various ways around the longstanding obstacle of copyright. The BBC is experimenting with live 3D cinema for Saturday's Strictly Come Dancing final, the Royal Ballet is beaming Thursday's performance of The Sleeping Beauty live to the world's cinemas. And if anyone has been yearning in vain for a live Nutcracker this winter (unlikely, with half a dozen productions up and down Britain), they can buy a movie ticket next week to watch a "live" Read more ...