Sadler's Wells
judith.flanders
How do simple things get complicated? How do they stay simple once they are complicated? These might, perhaps, be the questions from which choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, starts. But in fact, she starts, as all great choreographers do, with the music. “Music is always my first partner,” she once said. And in Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, three linked duets and one solo, there are indeed three people on stage: de Keersmaeker herself, the wonderful Tale Dolven, and Steve Reich, absent but ever present.All dance is a combination of form (the steps) and Read more ...
charlotte.macmillan
Photography is linked closely with memory. Photographs help us recall family, friends, holidays, and it can attest to an event. But one could argue that it actually serves a purpose of forgetting. As we are immersed in a digital age, the photograph becomes a series of binary numbers which doesn’t exist until it is written or printed, and which can be erased as easily as it is captured. Photographs are now as close to human recall as technology will allow. Daniel Linehan's Montage for Three last night was a perfomance piece which tried to address that.Two dancers, Linehan and Salka Ardal Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if you’re going to headline yourself in the title of your show "the talent", you’d better have some: audiences aren’t forgiving. William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, ex-Royal Ballet dancers headlining their own company for the last decade, have a history of these pre-emptive strikes – an earlier show was called Critics’ Choice – and they also have a history of living up to them. Fortunately for all, The Talent does too.Trevitt and Nunn, now in their early forties, have retired from dancing and are planning their future as dance master impresarios. They began by holding an open Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There was not likely to be much ballet here, despite the Pet Shop Boys’ proud use of the word to distinguish their substantial three-act score. This delivers a richly James Bond-ish ride through big pop tunes, opulent filmic moments and some nice bumps between fantasy scene-setting and camp nightclubbing. It was the two musicians who thought up the idea of turning Hans Christian Andersen’s very beautiful and poignant 1897 fairytale into a ballet, a story in which the deliberate destruction of an astonishing, ingenious clock is not the end of the story, but becomes a celebration of creativity Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Born in Venezuela 48 years ago, de Frutos has never been the fairytale type, at least not overtly. His 20-year career of choreography has been a career of unstoppable fecundity, violent flamboyance, extreme, even grotesque exhibition, outrageous passion. To many he’s a shock jock of contemporary dance. To me he’s one of the two choreographers in Britain to whom I most look forward, pinned uneasily to the edge of my seat, waiting to be discomforted, disconcerted, left in turmoil and not sure what I believe any more.I thought Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez a grotesquely funny satire Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To achieve a black stage that emits or reflects no light is a hell of an achievement. To place a huge black horse with black rider onto that stage, without the slightest noise, and to contrive a black shadow on the black, is to create an image found in the fathomless wells of subconscious imagery, and the skill of that vision and realisation of it is something I doubt I'm going to forget.The Centaur and the Animal is a very strange and potent piece of theatre at Sadler’s Wells this week uniting - if it were possible - the pessimism of Japanese butoh dance-theatre with the mystical grandeur of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, which is only on for two nights at Sadler's Wells, indicating that his old London muckers worry about this Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are gifted dancers and there are creatures of the stage. You know the difference immediately. The latter have something shamanic about them, ageless at any age, almost eccentric in their power. Eva Yerbabuena is one of those very rare creatures, to whom I succumb as helplessly as a rabbit in front of a cobra.At Sadler’s Wells in an intensely emotional new production this weekend inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Cuando yo era (When I Was…) she exhibits her trademark adamantine sombreness, dressed inevitably like a granny (she did so when she was 20, she does so now she’s 40), frowning Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Every February the Sadler’s Wells flamenco festival summons the illusion of Spanish sun onto our chilled, grateful backs - this year singers are getting almost as much prominence as dancers. But what sun, I ask, at Estrella Morente’s dark, often remote evening, opening the fortnight last night? (And why, still, after years of urgent requests, no subtitles for these pungently melodramatic lyrics?)Morente has a long record despite her young age - she’s only 30 - and was Penélope Cruz’s singing voice in the 2006 Almodóvar film Volver. A past visitor to Sadler's Wells, she is the child of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I am far from the first - and in very good company - to worry about the over-commercialisation of flamenco. As far back as in 1922 Manuel de Falla and Federico Garcia Lorca, respectively Spain’s greatest composer and poet of the time, decided to organise a singing competition in Granada in which only singers from the villages were allowed to enter. The polished, preening urban stars of the Café Cantantes were ineligible. My resistance to the genre was partly to do with the Gypsy Kings, amusing enough when you first heard them, but irritating beyond words when heard for years in every Read more ...
judith.flanders
Jardin aux Lilas is one of ABT’s great calling cards, and it was danced with great seriousness of purpose and devotion by an admirably schooled cast. This short ballet, to "Poème" by Chausson (admirably played by a pick-up orchestra), is one of psychology rather than action. In an Edwardian garden, Caroline (the distinguished Julie Kent, as youthful as when she joined the company 25 years ago), is about to marry a man she doesn’t love. She has a brief meeting with the man she does love (Cory Stearns, well cast); in turn, her fiancé, a stuffed shirt, is approached by his now-discarded mistress Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Was it the worst-played and worst-danced performance of Duo Concertant I’ve ever seen? I can’t remember a direr in my experience of quite a few DCs. But then the opening night of American Ballet Theatre’s London tour was a set of fine promises falling flat with a thud. A delicate new sextet ruined by the piano player. A masterpiece of musical ballet murdered by the violinist, the pianist and the ballerina. A cod-ballet duet by Twyla Tharp deflated by an unhumorous leading lady. And the only tick - inasmuch as at least the dancers gave it what it needed - was a piece of ensemble window- Read more ...