If you have never watched a single episode of the BBC period gangster drama Peaky Blinders, I am not sure what you would make of Rambert’s two-act ballet version. I have watched all six series, and I still left confused. Confused, but also impressed by the five-star standard of the dancing, by the inventive stage pictures created by designer Moi Tran and by the three onstage musicians. Led by lead guitarist/vocalist Mitchel Emms, this trio blast out a score specially written for the piece by Roman GianArthur, alongside tracks featured on the TV show by Radiohead, Frank Carter and the Read more ...

Leeds-based Northern Ballet has built a reputation as a source of fine dancers who are also impressive actors. Federico Bonelli, the former Royal Ballet principal who took over its directorship in 2022, is proving a worthy steward of this tradition. The company’s latest visit to London is a triple bill of “shorts’, one almost 50 years old, the other two commissioned by Bonelli. Together they make an extremely satisfying menu.Opening the bill, Rudi Van Dantzig’s 1977 Four Last Songs, to Richard Strauss’s music, is a piece in the same vein as Macmillan’s Song of the Earth, with the Read more ...

What to expect of the National Ballet of Canada since its last London visit 11 years ago? Dance with an eco-message, a world-peace message, or more visible diversity on stage?It's all there in the homegrown triple bill the company has brought to Sadler’s Wells. But the primary message seems to be that The Great White North has undergone a choreographic renaissance over the past decade, becoming a purveyor of hot-ticket choreographers to the wider world. This programme spans three generations of creators, each of whom challenges ballet tradition in their own way.In the case of James Read more ...

The word “immersive” is overused. When an immersive experience can be anything from a foreign language course to a trip down the Amazon on a headset, what might immersive dance involve? Not watching from a plush-covered seat, probably, and the dance not happening on a stage.The Canadian choreographer Robert Binet has thought hard about how to effect greater proximity of dancer and spectator, short of the performers sitting in our laps. His project Dark With Excessive Bright, opening the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New Choreography, is a hugely imaginative, at times thrilling, attempt to bridge Read more ...

Double bills at the ballet don’t often come as neatly gift-wrapped. Each of the works in question was made just before or during lockdown, arriving at its premiere by the skin of its teeth. Each went on to win a Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for best choreography.And each leans heavily on orchestral music – one a glorious swirl of Rachmaninov, the other a showreel of memories from a musical life: Elgar, Beethoven, Schubert, Fauré and more Rachmaninov. Placed side by side for the first time the two works fit as snugly as a pair of ballet slippers.The Cellist, choreographer Cathy Marston Read more ...

Of all the classic musical scores that could appeal to a choreographer, three are catnip: Ravel’s Bolero, Bizet’s Carmen, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Each has been set dozens of times and the veteran Swedish dancemaker Mats Ek has notched up all three.Such is the pull of Rite, in fact, that Ek has just created his second version, almost 40 years after his first. It wasn’t that he was unhappy with that earlier Rite, he told an interviewer, but he felt that the drama of the music had more to uncover – specifically on the subject of “young women being forced into a tradition, which has Read more ...

Marshalling a mass of bodies around a stage is what all choreographers do. But nobody does it quite like Crystal Pite, the Canadian whose half-hour piece "Flight Pattern" – a comment on the global refugee crisis – was a hit for the Royal Ballet five years ago, earning an Olivier Award.She now returns with a full-evening extension of that material, adding two new sections that address equally big subjects, not least the rights of children to life and safety. This, along with a final section dealing with what Pite calls “the ultimate border crossing”, makes sense of the work’s over-arching Read more ...

How do you picture Gene Kelly? Most likely in his effervescent screen persona, either as the burly ex-GI of An American in Paris, or as the hoofer without a raincoat in Singin’ in the Rain.You’re less likely to picture him peering through a movie camera lens. Yet of the 47 films Kelly made over his 50-year career, he directed 11 of them and was choreographer on 27. His legacy, he believed, was what he delivered behind the camera, not in front of it.He also attained the distinction, in 1960, of being the first American commissioned to choreograph for the Paris Opera Ballet (George Balanchine Read more ...

The colour of a shoe might seem a trivial thing. But when in 2018 the dancewear manufacturer Freed launched the UK’s first range of pointe shoes to match darker skin tones, true equal opportunity in British ballet came a big step closer. The initiative came partly from the African-American dancer Cira Robinson who, during her time in New York with Dance Theatre of Harlem, had long since stopped having to buy standard shell-pink pointes and dye them in cold tea, and was shocked to find the UK ballet shoe market lagging so far behind.Robinson is now a senior artist with Ballet Black, Read more ...

When a great performer takes on the running of a ballet company, the effect on its dancers can be transformative. It happened when Mikhail Baryshnikov took on American Ballet Theatre in the 1980s. It’s been happening at English National Ballet since 2012 under Tamara Rojo.Now it’s the turn of Birmingham Royal Ballet to up its game under the influence of Carlos Acosta, who brings not only his under-the-skin experience, but new tastes and ideas, globally formed. The second edition of Carlos Curates – a triple bill of work new to the company and to British audiences – shows the dancers visibly Read more ...

You've got to hand it to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park: this venue never simply dusts off a familiar musical title and plonks it onstage. Their commitment to reinvestigating the material, whatever it is, has done wonders for the disparate likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jerry Herman, and Rodgers and Hammerstein remain ripe for continually fresh interpretation, as Nicholas Hytner's revelatory Carousel for the National in 1992 so agelessly proved and countless further reappraisals of their canon (the Daniel Fish Oklahoma!) have since borne out, as well.  But Read more ...

You could hardly call this back to normal at London’s premier dance house. For a start, there was too much red plush visible in the stalls, not all of it the result of COVID-safe spacing. There were prefatory onstage speeches and a filmed thank you from Tamaro Rojo, the artistic director who must have suffered a thousand deaths over the past year – at least up to the point English National Ballet was singled out to receive £3 million from the government’s Culture Recovery Fund. Applause and cheers erupted at every mention of dancers or musicians or those more often under-thanked technicians, Read more ...