Sadler's Wells
Ismene Brown
This is a great spring for dance-lovers. Tucked in for two nights at Sadler's Wells (catch it again tonight) is the return of Wayne McGregor's FAR, well timed to appear just before his latest ballet at Covent Garden next week. Uniquely among choreographers today, McGregor has two lives; two selves; two creative identities. The better known is that cool cult-leader at the Royal Ballet, with his slink-and-fidget on pointe that looks so trendy on classically trained ballerinas. The lesser known is the man whose imagination runs free and intuitively with his own company. Freed from the pointe Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This show was intended to be all about the men (see title). But it was the woman in motion who stormed off with the honours in this second edition of what has become tagged as the Sergei Polunin show. And a heavy, maternally hipped, middle-aged woman at that - step forward, the sensational Dana Fouras, a dancer of genius who blew every other performer off the stage in Russell Maliphant’s Two (including the hapless gentleman trying to duplicate her movements on the other side of the stage).Men in Motion Part 2 was surely an impromptu media event, created by the storm of press surrounding Read more ...
judith.flanders
NDT2 is a fascinating beast. The “junior” company of the venerable Nederlands Dans Theater, it features dancers on the cusp of maturity, aged generally between sixteen and their mid-twenties. Here, in choreography created especially for them, one can watch talent develop. And since the grown-up NDT-ers are known as some of the most exhilaratingly talented dancers in Europe, that is something very special.After a rather choppy decade with several artistic directors coming and going, NDT itself now has the British-born and -trained choreographer Paul Lightfoot at its helm. For NDT2, with Passe- Read more ...
judith.flanders
The one thing you can count on at an Alston evening is the quality of the music: everything Alston does, and everything he creates for his dancers, revolves around the music. In his wonderful Roughcut, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for clarinet and tape begins before the house lights dim, his sharp, vibrant phrases giving a sense of urgency to the audience before they have even settled down.Once the curtain goes up, Alston and his dancers manage the extraordinary feat of making the complex layers of music (the clarinet, played by the splendid Roger Heaton, is soon joined by James Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Flamenco is a fervently political dance language, riddled with subversion of class and gender rankings, honouring old people, hallowing sexual prowess, relishing mavericks, and yet commanding a special symbolic force when it's disciplined into a cuerpo de baile. The story of Fuenteovejuna is of uprising by peasants goaded too far by a vicious military whose assumption of the right to rape and pillage leads to comeuppance - a murder in which every one of the villagers takes shared responsibility and shouts, “Yo!” - “It was I!” That shout of individuality, yet blood-brotherhood, is flamenco in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Like a bleached Mount Parnassus for the gods, pouring linen down steep slopes in foaming white rivers, streaming white curtains up into heaven, few stage sets I’ve seen for a dance piece have been as captivatingly gorgeous as Es Devlin and Bronia Housman’s mountainous creation for Russell Maliphant’s new work. The dancers too are draped in white like gods - or statues to be unwrapped from dust-sheets. The visual metaphors cunningly overlap, for this is a work in which Maliphant intends homage to the art of sculptors, notably the French neo-classical rebel, Auguste Rodin.It comes across as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that this isn’t the first time that company has mislaid one of its finer talents. Ivan Putrov, who masterminded it, was also a splendid young principal who lost his compass inside Covent Garden, and last year sheared off to join the contemporary dance world.For Men in Motion he invited Polunin to join him and five others in a male-centred programme that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Who would imagine that the search for new dance audiences would result in a cascade of fairy tales and dramas at Sadler's Wells, the focus for hip eyes on culture? But it is so - The Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale all appear this year (following dear old Nutcracker over the Christmas period), though in radical new versions. Matthew Bourne has been commissioned to produce a new Sleeping Beauty for winter 2012, in the line of his previous classic rewrites Swan Lake, Cinderella and Nutcracker!. The Pet Shop Boys/Javier de Frutos creation based on Andersen's Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell contract - it proved the innocent gloriousness of the human impulse to make art, a joy that has no expectation of reward but without which no existence is possible.An incredible cornucopia of ballerina artistry showed that the interpretation of existing work is just as necessary to the soul as the surprise of new creation. Alina Cojocaru, Sylvie 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 ...
judith.flanders
It is unusual in art for collaborators to be of equal star-wattage. The pairing of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden was one such. Another, much longer-lasting, was Stravinsky and Balanchine, a partnership of equals that endured for nearly half a century. More recently, Antony Gormley has worked with both Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, to great effect. Can Turnage, McGregor and Wallinger replicate these? This has been the question.The answer is, unequivocally, yes. Wallinger took the lead, presenting a rich brew of possible starting points, which included the idea of the “window” created by Read more ...