Dance
theartsdesk in Toronto: Luminato Hosts Wainwright and MalkovichSunday, 20 June 2010
To get a feel for whether an arts festival has truly penetrated a city’s psyche, it helps to strike up a conversation with local Starbucks baristas. That’s why I was grateful to be asked one recent evening in Toronto, “So what exactly is Luminato... Read more... |
On Their Toes!, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham HippodromeWednesday, 16 June 2010
Hans van Manen does basic instincts in ballet better than anyone alive. The Dutch choreographer, nearly 78 and far too little exposed in Britain, is a near-contemporary of Kenneth MacMillan, another specialist in sexual relations, but where... Read more... |
A starlet no longer - now Sergei is to be Covent Garden's new starThursday, 10 June 2010A new male star will be leading the Royal Ballet next season - a prodigious in-house talent of just 20. Sergei Polunin, Ukrainian-born and Royal Ballet School-trained, has been elevated to top rank in the Royal Ballet’s end-of-year promotions after... Read more... |
Swan Lake, ENB, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 09 June 2010
Within two bars of the overture starting, the first flashes could be seen. English National Ballet’s arena Swan Lake at the Albert Hall - they make no bones about it now - is intended for people who rarely go to the ballet. Actually it is in many... Read more... |
Michael Clark Company, Come, Been and Gone, BarbicanTuesday, 08 June 2010
A second coming for Michael Clark's recent Barbican commission Come, Been, Gone. Eight months after the London premiere (on which I opined unenthusiastically below last October), he has added another 20 minutes of choreography, they said, with new... Read more... |
Kabuki, Sadler's WellsFriday, 04 June 2010
It is hard to think of anything more "foreign" than kabuki to the Anglo style of acting, a style which reveres naturalism and makes "reality" its ultimate aim. Yet kabuki is gaining a knowledgeable – and welcoming – audience in London. The Shochiku... Read more... |
Royal Ballet New Works, Linbury Studio Theatre, ROHFriday, 04 June 2010
Ninette de Valois said the solution to a shortage of choreographic talent was this: “You wait.” Waiting through the Nineties and early Noughties proved the Royal Ballet founder’s point - suddenly new distinctive ballet talent is cropping up all over... Read more... |
Chroma/ Tryst/ Symphony in C, Royal BalletMonday, 31 May 2010
A Balanchine on a mixed bill is a reminder of what a choreographer should desire to offer his audience: a specific new experience of art each time, not a repeated thumbprint in every ballet. Balanchine grew up in a borderless theatre country... Read more... |
Christopher Wheeldon premiere, New York City BalletSunday, 30 May 2010
What is going on at New York City Ballet, home of the abstract, neo-classical, pared-down, no-scenery, no-story, nothing-extraneous aesthetic that George Balanchine made into an artistic religion? So far, three out of the four pieces commissioned... Read more... |
The Art of Touch/ Rainforest/ A Linha Curva, Rambert, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 25 May 2010
There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her... Read more... |
BABEL (words), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Antony Gormley, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 18 May 2010
Collaborations for dance, theatre and other things are coming thick and fast at Sadler’s Wells nowadays - these are not halcyon days for pure choreography. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has become a regular at Rosebery Avenue with his mixed-theatre works FOI... Read more... |
Wayne McGregor & Alexei Ratmansky premieres, New York City BalletSunday, 16 May 2010
In the New York City Ballet’s grand tradition of ambitious festivals of new work, its current offering, Architecture of Dance, is a big, ambitious deal: seven new ballets; four of them to commissioned scores; five sporting sets by the famed... Read more... |
