choreographers
Ismene Brown
Any newcomers to Merce Cunningham who visit the last performances ever in Britain of his modern dance company - renowned, even notorious, for its abstruse abstractness - will surely go away with an impression of laughter, playfulness, the lightness of being. On two more nights, tonight and tomorrow, this landmark company will perform his dances, and then - like the end of his piece Ocean, which you can see on film tomorrow - when the clock runs out, the last dancer will leave the stage, and that will be the end of it.Few choreographers plan their finale as exactly as Cunningham did before he Read more ...
judith.flanders
Being a choreographer is harder than it looks. Steps, movement, are just the beginning. On top of that you need to have a sense of theatricality, and then, even more, you need to be able to convey your ideas, through movement alone, to the audience. On these counts, Bern:Ballett’s visit to the Linbury fails to make the grade.Cathy Marston, Royal Ballet-trained, was the Opera House's first associate choreographer in residence a decade ago, and her works have had frequent showings over the years now. She is a serious and dedicated worker, she clearly has big ideas she wants to explore, but Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who feels, as I do, that the Aesthetic Movement's "cult of beauty" now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum can't compare with the fabulous Ballets Russes exhibition which went before it can dine again on a feast of Russian colour at the Coliseum. You'll eventually be rewarded, in this Kremlin Ballet-based company's first show, with the closest to the spirit of 1910 a recent London Firebird has ever come. Whether the choreography and the music for The Blue God have more than the loosest connection with Diaghilev is another matter.The argument goes that Le dieu bleu, as it was 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
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
Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly Ninety, and this is fittingly the last thing we will see of his company as it blazes one final circuit before closing down in December 2011. With work as exacting as his, it is inconceivable for his dancers to continue to operate as a full-time company without him, and so the grave decision was taken to carry out a final two-year tour around the Read more ...
theartsdesk
After Monday's report on the Royal Opera House’s new contract demands, a young composer alerted theartsdesk to an intriguing offer on the Covent Garden website - to "Create" a soundtrack for dance. This is a competition for new talent which will be judged by a team led by Deborah Bull, the ROH’s Creative Director: the winning entries to be shown at the ROH in November as part of the FIRSTS 2010 festival.
Create invites any composer over the age of 12 to create a new piece of music to short films of excerpts of existing choreography by two of the ROH’s associates, Will Tuckett and Wayne Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Choreography is a mystery art. How it happens - or indeed what happens - is as elusive to define as pinning down a brainstorm. There is no solid stuff, no rules, no pre-formed maxims, everything moves; the choreographer goes into a studio, finds some dancers, finds some music, finds some moves, finds some light and atmosphere - and this agglomeration of variables goes out on stage all too often to fall flat, a soufflé that didn't rise. It was insufficiently skilled, or its ingredients were stale, or it lacked the leavening of a compelling imagination or the flavour of real emotional Read more ...
howard.male
My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television phenomenon, so perhaps I should explain further.Glee is probably the most aptly named TV show ever devised, in that the dictionary defines “glee” as “open delight or pleasure; exultant Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Silhouetted against the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay, a pelican surveys the scene from a quayside bollard, then takes flight. The beautiful opening shot of Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event establishes a mood of elegiac tranquility. We are at Ford Point, on the east shore of the bay, in a magnificent building – a Ford factory that made military vehicles in World War Two, but closed down in 1955. Floor to ceiling windows afford breathtaking views across the water and allow the California light to flood in, transforming the floor into a liquid sheen of shadows and reflections.In Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As we look on the strictly dieting future that undoubtedly waits for the more esoteric arts after Thursday’s election, it’s evident that the dance landscape has already been blighted - and self-blighted, at that. Somewhere in the past few years a loss of confidence in dancing itself has allowed expressive and aesthetic exploration to become increasingly replaced by undemanding scenic gimmicks and numb circus derivations, subtle matters by dim clichés. My depressed thoughts after watching two of the middle scale shows that used to be common all over Britain and now are scarce as hens’ teeth. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In a shock that will deeply upset US and UK ballet, leading young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon has abandoned his own company, Morphoses, which he set up in the US less than three years ago as a rare example of a choreographer-led ballet troupe. His former executive director has pledged to continue the company under a series of annual guest curators from different artistic disciplines.The New York Times reports that Royal Ballet-trained Wheeldon resigned on 18 February after continuing rows between him and his executive director Lourdes Lopez. Lopez claimed Wheeldon could not Read more ...