21st century
Hanna Weibye
If you’ve reached the top of your profession and then spent twenty years there, retiring is going to be hard. It will be many times harder if, like New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan, you were only twenty-four when you reached that rank, and only in your mid-forties when injuries came calling and roles started to fall away - unwelcome signs that the end of a classical ballet career is nigh.With this tour of four new duets created especially for her, Whelan is experimenting with a new career as a freelance contemporary dancer. This is not a move made by many retiring ballerinas, since Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“If we go to the theatre, it’s because we want to be surprised, even amazed.” Peter Brook’s programme note for The Valley of Astonishment stresses emotion and sensation above all things. How curious then that the play itself should be so cold, so cerebral a thing. In unpacking the mysterious valley of the human mind, Brook has become so engrossed in his subject matter and its scientific facts and phenomena that he forgets to add the drama that they need to move from lecture to theatre.Brook’s latest work – another collaboration with writer and director Marie-Hélène Estienne following The Suit Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Before Janelle Monáe even materialises at Brixton’s O2 Academy, her presence is already felt in the stagecraft. Lab-coated, bow-tied techies unsheath the instruments from their black covers, revealing a glimmering monochrome set-up in the centre of a giant white cube reminiscent of the "Q.U.E.E.N." video. Three - count ‘em, three - men see to the polishing of Monáe’s microphone. The build-up is every bit as meticulous as the stunning 90 minute set that’s to follow.When Monáe does appear, she’s wheeled onstage in a straightjacket. Across her early EPs and albums The ArchAndroid and The Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It might be quite unnerving for a young performer to have the première of a new solo show take place in the same building, at the same time, as Sylvie Guillem is dancing William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián. But Aakash Odedra, who presented two new pieces, Murmur and Inked, in the Patrick Centre inside the Birmingham Hippodrome on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, has had more dealings than most with superstar dancers and choreographers: his mentor Akram Khan is both (and incidentally a collaborator of Guillem’s). Russell Maliphant and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui have also created pieces Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Lord may have tickled his last ivory in 2012, but last night his spirit lived defiantly on. The great and the good from both heavy and contemporary music gathered in his memory. It was for a serious purpose - to raise funds for pancreatic cancer care. But, boy, what a time we had doing it. A revolving door of stars brought us wild solos, screaming vocals and thundering rhythms. But before all the classic rock, culminating in a set from Deep Purple, came something a little more classical.The first hour was devoted to Lord’s orchestral compositions. Our host was “whispering” Bob Harris, who Read more ...
David Nice
Nature declined to reveal the Northern Lights over a long winter weekend in Iceland. My hotel was geared up to the spectacle, offering the option of a phone call any time in the night should they appear; but no call came. I only hope the tourists who packed the outward-bound plane hadn’t booked just for that. They’d surely not be disappointed in this most spectacular of lands so long as the weekend package-tour selling point wasn’t an idée fixe, and in any case I suspect half had come to club the night away.Our own Aurora Borealis was simulated in one of the halls of Olafur Eliasson’s Read more ...
Simon Munk
You are staring at your computer screen; you are literally you. And now, through the wonder of modern technology, you can jump into the mind of, and take over, the security head of a near-future corporation's flying fortress. You control his speech, movements, decisions. That's how Consortium starts.You jump into Bishop 6's head just as he wakes up for his first shift on the Zenlil plane/fortress of the global Consortium security force. The game uses Bishop 6's status as new kid, and your status as new kid inside Bishop 6, to toy with you throughout.Other staff onboard regularly ask you Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gwilym Simcock, pianist, composer, and jazz-classical crossover specialist, is releasing two albums this year, and at Kings Place last night, the audience had a taste of both. An evening billed as the launch of Instrumation, Simcock’s new album of original suites, became a kind of Simcock tasting menu. He played half of Instrumation, which was officially launched, and sections from his second album of 2014, Reverie at Schloss Elmau.There was also a first set from Simcock’s trio with French saxophonist Celine Bonacina and bassist Michel Benita, which was technically and musically intricate and Read more ...
mark.kidel
“The Little Mermaid”, along with many other classic tales, suffers from having been Disneyfied: Hollywood made sure that the shadows darkening Hans Christian Andersen’s original were softened for family viewing and his ambiguous end replaced by American-style positive closure firmly set in the mainstream comfort zone. Simon Godwin’s production pays homage to panto without being tied to the clichés and steers a sensible path between the pain and suffering evoked by the Danish master and the need for a joyful end in which the young lovers live happily ever after.The show takes a long while to Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Patchy but visual, actor/director Ben Stiller ignores the Hollywood motto of not remaking anything good to create an all-encompassing take on the daydreamer Walter Mitty.Stiller’s dramatic romantic comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is far from the beloved 1947 original starring Danny Kaye based on James Thurber’s magical short story of 1939. This glossy reboot written by Steven Conrad (Pursuit of Happyness) sees Stiller as Walter, an exceptional everyman (if there can be such a thing) whose life is spent in heroic daydreams as he copes with what he sees as a non-heroic life. Losing his Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At first it looked like a joke. But, as each muscle spasm, set off by an electric shock, did appear to produce a pained expression in the performer and a subsequent note, one slowly had to accept that these four string quartet players were indeed being electrocuted into performance. The Wigmore Hall, it wasn’t. Sonica, it certainly was.This was the second year of the four-day festival that, each November, takes over Glasgow's galleries, theatres, warehouses and shop windows and runs amok, stretching the meaning of music to its artistic, intellectual and technological limits. Cross-pollination Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This was Sakari Oramo's first concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra since taking over as chief conductor. Of course he knows the orchestra well already, but it was important to make this a good ’un, and so it was.It opened with the world premiere of a 20-minute work by French composer Tristan Murail, with the double title Reflections/Reflets. As the title perhaps suggests it offered an evocative, colouristic sound world. The first half, "Spleen", dealt in bells, swells and waves rising out of a murky brass and low string background. The second, "High Voltage", featured slow glissandi, Read more ...