Balanchine
Jenny Gilbert
As the new season opens, confidence is high at ENB, just as it should be given the roaring success of recent programmes featuring the latest work of iconoclast William Forsythe. His classical steps set to disco raised the roof.The company’s current mixed bill, R:Evolution, also contains some Forsythe, but within a more sober, even academic frame, the idea being to track the evolution of ballet across eight decades: from George Balanchine and Martha Graham – two distinct voices of the 1940s – to a Forsythe classic from 1992, to a grandly conceived new work from internationalist David Dawson. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer who has helped keep the choreographer’s legacy intact since his death in 1983 and a living link with his teaching. Neary has been working with the RB as a coach, advisor and stager of Balanchine’s work for the past 57 years. “Oh yes!” was her emphatic answer.Neary, who didn’t even hang up her pointe shoes until she was 70, has now decided to spend more time with her husband in Los Angeles. In its new all-Balanchine triple bill, the company shows how thoroughly Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Great ballet dancers who boldly turn away from a stellar international career to grow a national ballet company in their homelands are few, but legendary. Alicia Alonso did it in Cuba, Ninette de Valois did it in Britain. And, dancing across the cusp of even more perilous political weather than either, so did the brilliant Bolshoi Ballet star Nina Ananiashvili when 20 years ago she left the world stage to return to her broken and battered native Georgia and generate its own classical ballet company. This summer London will see the State Ballet of Georgia's British debut, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To the international world of ballet, Clement Crisp was the British critic to fear for half a century. Crisp's dance reviews for the Financial Times – "the pink 'un" – from 1970 until 2020 were legendary for their passionate fastidiousness about ballerinas and high style, their acuity about rising talents and the difficulties of creativity, and – often – their ferocity, when he saw something he thought a blight.They were written with an unstoppable effervescence and expressiveness in language that sent readers hunting down their dictionaries for words like "borborygm Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
People often ask why it is that in ballet there are different casts on different nights, a practice alien to opera, musicals and theatre. The most obvious reason is practical. Ballet companies keep a number of principal dancers on salary who need regularly to strut their stuff. Another reason is that dancers develop distinct individual qualities – technical, musical and dramatic – which imprint on the works they dance. Add to that the mysterious chemistry of partnering, the capacity of one dancer to bring out the best in another, and you begin to understand why hardcore balletomanes beggar Read more ...
New York City Ballet 2021 Spring Gala online review - Balanchine and Robbins shine in a dark theatre
Jenny Gilbert
It’s official. Masks are coming off across America while theatres remain dark. Over here, theatres are about to re-open and masks must be worn. An identical situation gives rise to different responses prompted by local preoccupations. Local preoccupations are at work in ballet too. Witness the 2021 Spring Gala performance put out digitally by New York City Ballet. Nothing says NYCB like the mid-20th-century choreography of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. And nothing says NYCB like having Chanel sponsor your first-ever digital Spring Gala, and a Hollywood name direct it.Happy to relate, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The magnificent, controversial Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, who asserted that she would live to 200, died yesterday in Havana, aged nearly 99. Legends are always well protected by their own mythology, yet in 2004, when attending the Havana Ballet Festival, I had a long interview with her, finding her surprisingly open and genial for such an autocratic icon. What she had to say was fascinating as a record not only of history's sweep and ballet's charmed circles of talent, but of the gritty human being who reached the pinnacle of ballerinadom and political influence despite near Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
You can’t accuse the Royal Ballet of lightweight programming: the three juicy pieces in the triple bill that opened at the Royal Opera House on Tuesday add up to a three-hour running time. That’s a lot of ballet for your buck. Whether they actually go together is another question. Russian-ness is a rather tenuous thread to link the mythic extravaganza of The Firebird, the torrid claustrophobia of Ashton's Month in the Country and the faceted neo-classicism of Balanchine's Symphony in C.A Month in the Country, Frederick Ashton’s throbbing little ode to forbidden passions running high in a Read more ...
The Unknown Soldier, Infra, Symphony in C, Royal Ballet, review - WWI ballet honours obscure tragedy
Jenny Gilbert
Pity fatigue is a risk for any artwork marking the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. There can’t have been a man or woman in the Royal Opera House on Tuesday night who hadn’t already read, watched, or otherwise had their fill of the horrors of the Western Front and the never-ending debate over the futility of it all. So a 30-minute ballet, coming nine days after the Cenotaph solemnities and commissioned by the Royal Ballet, inevitably felt like an unrequested encore.The Unknown Soldier, a collaboration between choreographer Alastair Marriott, designer Es Devlin and composer Dario Marianelli Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Liam Scarlett must be worked off his feet. Just at the Royal Ballet, he made a full-length work, Frankenstein, last year and is currently working on a new Swan Lake; and now last night he has premiered a new abstract work, Symphonic Dances at the Royal Opera House. A one-acter, but at 45 minutes a substantial one, set to the work of the same name by Rachmaninov, this premiere was an important moment for Scarlett, whose last two new works for the company, Frankenstein and Age of Anxiety, received at best mixed reviews. Symphonic Dances is not a masterpiece, but it's the best Scarlett I've seen Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Balanchine's Jewels is catnip to dedicated ballet lovers. A homage, faithful and brilliant as only a master could make, to three different styles of choreography and three different national sensibilities, it's as dense, expertly carved and glittering as the gems of the title.It is also plotless, and so presents a signficant challenge to the performers, who must hold an audience's attention for a whole evening without the aid of narrative or emotional material. After all, however beautiful the sight of Royal Ballet dancers in sparkly tutus in the even more sparkly Royal Opera House may be, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This is it. This is absolutely, definitely, finally Carlos Acosta's farewell to classical ballet. He has managed to spin out his retirement celebrations for almost a year: he gave his last performance on the Royal Opera House main stage last November, and there have already been two versions of the gala show which opened at the Royal Albert Hall last night, one at the Coliseum last autumn and a touring one during the spring and early summer of this year. But this – we believe – really is the last chance to see Acosta on stage in classical roles.It's some way to go out. The previous version of Read more ...