choreographers
Ismene Brown
The Noughts were a bonanza time for builders, scientists and bureaucrats in the dance arena, throwing up numerous fine dance venues and bases, collaborating intellectually with modern choreographers, or targeting social minorities, but the blazing new trend that captured public imagination dodged all of those - it came up from the street. As if to show that dance doesn’t need all these people to organise it into existence, hip hop was the powerful new physical force in the land, providing all the things that the contemporary dance movement of the Nineties seemed increasingly to ignore. The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A delicious new treat is promised at The Royal Opera House for Christmas: a comic opera by Tchaikovsky that brings the wit and fun of a Russian magical folk tale to the stage in a staging of rare opulence. A story of turbulent love, magical rides through the sky with the Devil, and an impossible task - to get a peasant girl a pair of Catherine the Great's slippers - The Tsarina's Slippers has ballets and Cossack dancing as well as a host of singing characters.Director Francesca Zambello, costume designer Tatiana Noginova and choreographer Alastair Marriott here reveal their preparations, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I try to remember when I first saw Mark Morris’s dance company and what I thought of them. Fairly weird, I recall - like chubby church-goers, with their big bottoms, fleshy arms and homespun cheeriness, not remotely part of the sharp-boned, athletically wired contemporary dance that was all around. And they weren’t balletic either, despite their little village hall arabesques and occasional flying jetés. But by gum what they did was musical, and that smacked you straightaway.The dance world is even leaner and more chicken-jointed now, and musical understanding has virtually dropped out of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.These transcripts come from 1997, before Artangel’s staging at London’s Roundhouse of what became instantly known as the white bouncy castle, Tight Roaring Circle, 2001 before the showing of two full-length ballet productions, Artifact and Eidos:Telos by his Ballett Frankfurt, then his company, and 2003, on the closing down by conservative civic authorities of Ballett Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There’s a sly in-joke in the plastering of Mark Morris posters over Sadler’s Wells when Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas are currently inside it. Morris, the waggish American choreographer whose publicity shouts “Joy, Pure Joy”, dubbed her “De Tearjerker” when she followed him into the prestigious position of resident choreographer at Brussels’ Théâtre de la Monnaie.Joy is not what De Keersmaeker offers in Rosas danst Rosas. Resignation rather, tiredness, restlessness, boredom, unease, exhaustion, yes, in spades. This was the work that made her name 25 years ago, when she was herself only Read more ...