Dance
Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, Sadler's WellsFriday, 18 December 2009
For a choreographer the moment your work becomes a classic is when the audience tells you that you’re casting it wrong. I’ve seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake more than a dozen times for professional reasons since it first took off from Sadler’s Wells... Read more... |
Pied Piper, Barbican & Into the Hoods, QEHWednesday, 16 December 2009
Hip hop is the new ballet. Instead of mostly girls in tutus, mostly boys in tracksuits; instead of pointe-shoes, trainers; instead of arabesques and fouettés, handstands and windmills; above all, instead of nice, nasty. The smell on stage is burning... Read more... |
Les Patineurs & Tales of Beatrix Potter, Royal BalletTuesday, 15 December 2009
The well-prepared adult accompanying an under-10 to the Royal Ballet’s Tales of Beatrix Potter will take with them a pillow and a potty, the pillow for themselves, the potty to tuck under the seat for the necessary moment during this 70-minute... Read more... |
Different Drummer: the Life of Kenneth MacMillanSaturday, 12 December 2009
The spy out in the cold, the alienated Heathcliff of ballet, rough-hewn, moody and a little frightening - this is an image that’s commonly paraded of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. His ballets stand up that image, staging barely watchable... Read more... |
Carlos Acosta, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 02 December 2009
It‘s when you see how popstar fame can reach people with more luck than work that Carlos Acosta’s achievement in becoming a truly popular ballet star is underlined. Ballet is just the toughest discipline there is. Great elite artists and great... Read more... |
Margot, BBC FourMonday, 30 November 2009
If Margot Fonteyn and Rudy Nureyev were the most massively important people who ever existed in ballet, then the most massively important question that ever existed in ballet was, did they sleep together? Last night Margot got this over pleasingly... Read more... |
Film Q&A Special: Only When I DanceMonday, 30 November 2009
There are gunshots outside in the street, a boy sits behind his front door desperate to get to ballet class, the two sides of his life colliding in front of his eyes - reality and dream. It’s a favela in Rio, one of the most dangerous cities in the... Read more... |
The Nutcracker, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham HippodromeSaturday, 28 November 2009
Peter Wright’s superlative production of The Nutcracker has returned to Birmingham Royal Ballet's repertory for Christmas, a production he created for the company in 1990 and to my mind superior to any other presented in the UK today. Magic, the... Read more... |
Akram Khan and Nitin Sawhney, Sadler's WellsFriday, 27 November 2009
Akram Khan and Nitin Sawhney are too famous to need defining in terms of racial culture, and yet they make a lot of it in the spiel about their offering Confluence, closing the two-week Svapnagata festival at Sadler’s Wells this weekend. When both... Read more... |
Interview: Anne-Marie Duff plays Margot FonteynFriday, 27 November 2009
Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her... Read more... |
How To Design The NutcrackerSunday, 22 November 2009
Christmas ballet would be unthinkable without The Nutcracker. But what kind of Christmas should it be? This year the UK fields an astonishing array of visions, from Biedermeier formality at the Royal Ballet, to Fanny and Alexander romanticism at... Read more... |
Design gallery: Three NutcrackersSunday, 22 November 2009
Is the look to be Beckmann, Bergman or Nicky Haslam? To accompany the interviews with Nutcracker designers elsewhere, here are three very different design portfolios tackling the eternal magic of this favourite ballet with unexpected reference... Read more... |
