tue 22/07/2025

Dance

Romeo and Juliet in Opera and Ballet

Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National...

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The Art of Touch/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Wycombe Swan

Henrietta Horn's Cardoon Club: As moreish as a hideously mixed Tequila Sunrise

The Blitz may be about to descend on dance in theatres, but Rambert have the authentic British grit under fire. They truck on into a bleak autumn with the courage to present to the straitened nation a new commission of music and dance, and a new...

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Stephen Petronio Company, Barbican Theatre

This picture is only a wish-list for choreography that doesn't attain its imagery

Nico Muhly at the piano, Stephen Petronio in a false beard, a storm-at-sea theme derived from The Tempest - how hip is that? I Drink the Air Before Me, a new work for the Stephen Petronio Company as the opening night of this year’s Dance Umbrella (...

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From the Ballets Russes, BFI

Where Busby Berkeley learned everything he knew

This is the second part of a series that has passed a little too quietly for comfort. The V&A’s grand Diaghilev show has received all the noise in the press – “fabulous”, “sumptuous”, “exotic” – in fact, all the words that were used at the time...

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Onegin, Royal Ballet

One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with...

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Production Gallery: Russell Maliphant's AfterLight

New photographs by Charlotte MacMillan of Russell Maliphant's expanded Afterlight, a mesmerising new dancework premiered at Sadler's Wells this week. The portfolio adds stills from the substantial new sections to ones she took a year ago of the...

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Russell Maliphant Company, AfterLight, Sadler's Wells

We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a...

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Birmingham Royal Ballet, Pointes of View, Birmingham Hippodrome

Elisha Willis in Tharp's 'In the Upper Room': 'This is a thrilling, mesmerising dance'

It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties...

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Behind the Scene at the Museum: The Staging of the Diaghilev Exhibition

The show's curator Jane Pritchard revealed this wonderful kitchen story in a unique walk-round with theartsdesk this week. Her two-year hunt ranged from Diaghilev's passport to glorious Nijinsky costumes, from the Ballets Russes accounts book to...

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Scottish Ballet, Geometry + Grace, Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Quietly, without pomp and fanfare, Ashley Page has been mustering a balletic strike force over the border in Scotland. Scottish Ballet has launched the new ballet year with a programme that trumps anything else offered in Britain as a season opener...

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Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929, V&A

Museum shows don’t often evoke a sense of smell, but without even trying, this Ballets Russes exhibition has visitors’ nostrils flared. The show is – intentionally – a feast for the eye, and even for the ear, with ballet scores (sometimes rudely...

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The ROH's Create contract tells the truth about the rights grab

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...

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