Sadler's Wells
Ismene Brown
A new production opens tonight at Sadler's Wells based on the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, Japan's master of manga art. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and composer Nitin Sawhney shared a love of comics as a boy that turned into the more sophisticated admiration for the narrative subtlety and precise visions that the best of comics led to. And to Cherkaoui it seemed a compelling world for theatrical treatment.Tezuka (1928-1989) was the most influential cartoonist in Japanese manga, credited with having invented the “big eye” cartooning characteristic in Japan, itself a deliberate take Read more ...
judith.flanders
Only three years ago, Hofesh Shechter, the Israeli-born, London-based choreographer, made the leap into the big leagues, almost overnight, with his Uprising/In Your Rooms double bill. The following year he produced a "Choreographer’s Cut", a bulked-up version in the Roundhouse, part dance, part gig. 2010’s Political Mother was received with rapture, so what next? Yes, of course, another Choreographer’s Cut, this time Political Mother in an amped-up version with 24 musicians and 16 dancers in front of a Sadler’s Wells audience, the front stalls removed and transformed into a wannabe mosh pit. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sylvie Guillem is back, chicken-skinny, middle-aged, dressed like a dowd. Did I just write that? And let’s add: as swift as mercury, as exact as a feather, as light as the sun, and as eternal in intelligent beauty as Nefertiti. In contemporary dance, as I was saying at the weekend, it should be permissible to sit in the dark wondering at the inexplicable and the unbelievable. This great ballerina of our era is both inexplicable and unbelievable, in physique and in temperament. Not least incredible is that a Parisienne of 46 would allow herself to appear in two outfits that compete Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yesterday was a day when male physicality and the science of movement preoccupied - when you watch Rafa Nadal or Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, you can’t help thinking about the contrasts of grace that achieve the same athletic needs; Nadal the pouncing cheetah, the rich, weighty speed of Tsonga. Thing is, when you watch programmes about the greatness of tennis, they don’t try to persuade you that it’s just as good to watch if you yourself learn to play and get it filmed for the public's delight.This false premise has recently taken over the entire contemporary dance world; we must become awful Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The two-course evening out is made possible by the Wigmore Hall’s late Friday-night concerts, so if you get out of a central-London show - or dinner - by, say, 9.30, you can add a second layer of entertainment at 10. In my case, a ferociously poor hour spent at contemporary dance in Sadler’s Wells was offset by an hour with Joanna MacGregor in a stimulating splicing of Bach and Shostakovich piano music that at least offered something to think about, if not ultimate satisfaction. Evening not entirely wasted, then.MacGregor is worth following for her communication skills, more than Read more ...
judith.flanders
When asked if I wanted to go and see two dozen naked Canadians doing audience participation, the answer was, self-evidently, nonononononononono. And then, for good measure, NO. Well, I’m here to tell you, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And I apologise to Dave St-Pierre and Company for my foolish prejudices. Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde ("A little tenderness, for Pete's sake") is an amazing evening of theatre.Nakedness, while headline-grabbing, is not the point. Pina Bausch described St-Pierre’s company as “my pornographic illegitimate children”, but as so often with Pina Bausch, she Read more ...
judith.flanders
Paul Taylor's Roses is called Roses because, well, because it is. There are no roses here, no flowery sentiment, no overwrought angst and emotion. This, one of Taylor’s most beautifully serene works, is the smell of roses on a still May evening: fleeting, evanescent and heart-breakingly beautiful. It is also some of the most magisterial - and startlingly original - choreography, even a quarter of a century after it was first made.The curtain rises on five couples, the women formally dressed in long navy dresses, the men, in contrast, in informal grey/brown undershirts and trousers. To Read more ...
judith.flanders
David Nixon has been artistic director of Northern Ballet for a decade, and it’s probably safe to say he is the king of the story ballet: Wuthering Heights, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Butterfly, Dracula – if it’s got a story, he is, seemingly, willing to tell it. As Christopher Wheeldon’s recent Alice in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet showed, this is not as easy as might first appear. Nixon shoots straight from the hip: he is interested in narrative, he loves answering the question, “What happened then?”In Cleopatra, of course, it’s more a question of what didn’t happen to her: in Read more ...
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 ...
judith.flanders
Pénombre, penumbra: "The partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body, when the light source is larger than a point source and only part of its light is cut off (contrasted with the full shadow or umbra)." Pénombre, penumbra: "An area where shade blends with light; a shadowy area." Pénombre, penumbra: "A faint intimation of something undesirable; a peripheral region of uncertain extent; a group of things only partially belonging to some central thing." So even as we start, we are already in the shadows.With Ballets C de la B, you never quite know what you are going to get. The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sad news for arts lovers with an eye on the horses - Sadler’s Wells, dubbed the greatest-ever sire of racehorses, died this week aged 30. His parents were the champion sire Northern Dancer and Fairy Bridge, and the arts supplied the names for racing's most legendary dynasty that would dance to victory again and again. Half-brother to Nijinsky and Nureyev, sire of Old Vic, Sadler's Wells brought the dancing line in horseracing to a superb peak.Trained by Vincent O'Brien (who also trained Triple Crown-winner Nijinsky), he was a multiple winner as a three-year-old in 1984, and was within a year Read more ...
judith.flanders
Sometimes, watching contemporary dance, you feel that no choreographer has ever known a happy moment – such angst, such grief, such terrible agony rolls over the footlights out to the audience that arriving at the theatre feeling mildly content can seem like an act of subversion. On their last night of this too-short season, however, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas company produced one of her most joyous and enjoyable pieces. For as the choreographer reminds us here, joy, cheerfulness and even sheer good temper are also emotions, and also worth exploring.First, however, comes tenderness. Read more ...