Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain, or Laurey’s dream in Oklahoma!, whose first interpreter was its choreographer Agnes de Mille.In our own century, Christopher Wheeldon, who started out as a dancer with the Royal Ballet, has had no difficulty straddling the divide between pointework and hoofing – or moonwalking, come to that. In the very same week that this mixed bill devoted to his work opened at the Royal Opera House, he nailed down an Olivier award for his Read more ...

In 2022, the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz made a duet on Royal Ballet principals William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan, which they performed at the company’s Diamond Celebration. That piece has now evolved into a true gem.Or Forevermore is Tanowitz at her most larky. In its 30-minute span, it takes many of the conventional pieties of ballet and amusingly but firmly disrupts them. We start outside the ROH’s majestic red curtains, where a spotlight picks out a dancer (O’Sullivan on opening night) in a plush garnet-red tracksuit. A sultry sax and bluesy strings accompany her as she 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 ...

Triple bills can be a difficult sell for ballet companies. Audiences prefer big sets and costumes, and a storyline they can hum. It’s not hard to see why Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening hits Romeo and Juliet and Manon have turned out to be such a valuable legacy for his widow and daughter – companies around the world have an endless appetite for staging them.But MacMillan’s shorter pieces have challenged the art form in a greater variety of ways. They have arguably also done more to shape the collective identity of the company that he tried several times to escape but which repeatedly drew Read more ...

“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but none about the spectacle, even more impressive (as we subsequently agreed) than the big Cirque du Soleil extravaganzas that cost a helluva lot more for a seat in Vegas. On its own terms, The Mongol Khan is a five-star show – and I’m already recommending it to friends. Not without reservations of course. As is the case for Grand Opera newbies, one must Read more ...

As any archaeologist knows, digging up a sarcophagus is a nailbiting business. How small are the chances that inside the shredded linen wrappings will lie a recognisable body with some vestiges of its former life upon it?Enough DNA and bone to reconstruct the person's age, state of health, status – perhaps even enough detail on the face to bring the dead features back to life and a guess at personality? Properly mummified, a human body can yield an extraordinary amount of living information after thousands of years. But ballets vanish far quicker.Stop performing a ballet for a decade and a Read more ...

Filmed ballets involve a different way of watching: you may know a piece well, but you aren’t used to staring into its lead dancers’ eyes as they perform their roles. Not all dancers give good close-up, either. But a new film by the Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia of Akram Khan’s Creature, made for English National Ballet in 2021, has transformed the original live version into a moving drama.Creature still isn’t an easy watch. It’s set in a vast murky room with high ceilings and wooden planks for walls. Outside, when the side doors occasionally open, there is blindingly white light and Read more ...

Matthew Bourne is not the first choreographer to tinker with the story of The Sleeping Beauty and he won't be the last, such is the lure of Tchaikovsky's score and the potency of the plot.Good and evil, beauty and decrepitude, the suspended animation of adolescence – these are themes that will always invite a fresh spin. But Bourne’s version, now on its third season at Sadler’s Wells, signally fails to shed any new light on the archetypal tale of youth and hope triumphing over old grudges. The old ballet does this very well, some would say definitively. But by imposing an alien aesthetic on Read more ...

It's not every junior dance company that could sell out a house at Sadler's Wells. But NDT2 – younger sibling of one of Europe’s top contemporary dance ensembles, Nederlands Dans Theater, have grown over the last 35 years into a box office blockbuster in their own right.Marco Goecke’s The Big Crying, made shortly after the choreographer's father passed away, opens the evening with a haunting display of virtuosic strength. The dancers’ movements are incessant and frenetic – quick lifts, flicks of the leg and jagged arm gestures are so fast we are barely able to process them, giving a Read more ...

Hard as it is to imagine the British dance landscape without Richard Alston, we’re going to have to get used to it. The touring company that for the past 25 years has been the chief purveyor of his uniquely lyrical brand of contemporary dance has disbanded, and not because the 71-year-old wanted to call it a day. Far from it. Having lost more than half his public funding, he decided against operating at half-strength. He wanted his company to go out on a high, and so it has.It says much about the man and his creative energy that four of the six pieces in this farewell programme were Read more ...

Alexei Ratmansky stands out among contemporary choreographers for two reasons: he still creates genuinely classical dance, and he's more conscious than most that art is dependant on the society it's created in. His Shostakovich Trilogy, which received its UK premiere on Wednesday night at Sadlers Wells, should have been a triumphant opener for San Francisco Ballet's London season, a vehicle for the company to show off its technical proficiency and its artistic seriousness. Both were in evidence last night, but in a package that somehow managed to be less than the sum of its parts.None of Read more ...

Will Gregory (b.1959) is best known as one half of the alt-pop duo Goldfrapp but has a long career in music that dips into many areas. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was a working musician who toured with multiple bands, notably, Tears for Fears, as well as playing on sessions for albums by artists ranging from The Cure to Portishead. He is a multi-instrumentalist valued for his saxophone and woodwind playing (from Moondog and Michael Nyman to Peter Gabriel and it’s him on Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies), but as much for his general studio and arrangement abilities.Since 1999 Read more ...