We are bowled over! 

We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.

Is there a neuroscientist in the house? I need a latterday Oliver Sacks to tell me about earworms, specifically earworms issuing from the music of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. 

Filmmakers Powell and Pressburger were not the first to portray ballet dancing as a fatal obsession and choreographer Matthew Bourne won’t be the last, but the latter’s 2016 stage adaptation of The Red Shoes, Powell's 1948 film (now most famous as a favourite of Martin Scorsese), looks set for longevity nonetheless. Deftly invoking the postwar European dance scene and bringing sharp definition to the film’s plot and characters, the show brims with added entertaining detail.

The ballet world will soon run out of titles signifying a renaissance. After ENB’s recent Re:evolution comes London City Ballet’s Rebirth, following its debut programme last year called Resurgence. In LCB’s case, the term is quite literal.

As the new season opens, confidence is high at ENB, just as it should be given the roaring success of recent programmes featuring the latest work of iconoclast William Forsythe. His classical steps set to disco raised the roof.

Christopher Wheeldon has mined a new seam of narrative pieces for the Royal Ballet, having started out as a supreme practitioner of the abstract. After The Winter’s Tale and Alice in Wonderland, he landed in 2022 on the magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate, set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. This for me is less successful than the other two.

It was the absence of performing animals that defined it in the 1980s, but contemporary circus has come a long way since. Cirque Éloize, a smallish touring company which started in Montreal in the late 90s, has so effectively dissolved the boundaries between dance, acrobatics and theatre that it performs around the world under any or all of those banners.

Anyone who has followed the trajectory of choreographer-director Michael Keegan-Dolan and his West Kerry-based company Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance) will know by now to expect the unexpected. Such as a Swan Lake whose storyline, in part a searing attack on the abuses of the Catholic church, bore so little resemblance to the original that you might think you’d come to the wrong theatre until the spectacular finale seen through a blizzard of white feathers.

Mind, body, body, mind. Medical science confirms the powerful two-way traffic between emotional and physical health. Nonetheless the idea of separating the thoughts and the bodily experiences of George, the recently bereaved protagonist of A Single Man, in a two-act dance version of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, is neat.

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.