ballet
Ismene Brown
There are times when critics sheathe their quill tips, others when they don’t. Rupert Pennefather, the tall blond Englishman who has been earnestly promoted by the Royal Ballet as hard as they can to be the next Jonathan Cope, has attracted some devastating notices, and last night’s emergency outing as Romeo isn’t going to fatten his cuttings file. This new run of MacMillan’s feverish Romeo and Juliet was intended to open with the famed partnership of Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta, heading a rousing supporting cast. But Acosta was injured, and instead up stepped Pennefather, and never Read more ...
David Nice
If your heart feels frozen while the ice glitters outside, warm it by reading Hans Christian Andersen's sharp, witty and enchanting fairy-tale The Snow Queen, or listen to the best bits of Prokofiev's erratic but often characteristic late ballet The Stone Flower. You could also drag yourself out into the cold to face Michael Corder's full-length choreography based on the Andersen story, selectively fitted to chunks of the Prokofiev score and interspersing them with other lyric highlights of the composer's Soviet period, but that would have to be a third-best option.Something Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There were some odd sights in Christmas Day viewing but none more discomfiting, I’d bet, than seeing a ballerina lying on a physio’s couch having a leg dragged quickly up to touch the side of her head while the other leg lay perfectly still pointing downwards. Can the body really do that? Another weird sight - dozens of people in full 18th-century French costume and wigs dancing in 40-degree heat on a Cuban stage. Meanwhile coachloads of dancers were going down with swine flu and a 45-year-old retired dancer was flown in from Germany to take the part of a 20-year-old. Surely nothing is as Read more ...
theartsdesk
The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.See Wicked. This smart, feisty show is not just for teenage girls (though heaven knows they’ll thank you for taking them) but will tweak at the imagination and tickle the funny bone of anyone who’s ever contemplated the back-story of The Wizard of Oz. Stephen Schwartz’s zingy score is one of the best to have come out of Broadway in the last decade and you really Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The improvement in ballet film from video to DVD has been colossal and welcome. The audio experience too has improved by leaps and bounds as it is more and more geared towards computers with earphones, rather than dodgy TVs. Hand in hand with technological advances has come a long-overdue new openness to recording by the Royal Ballet, which is now catching up with other leading world companies in considerable style. Here theartsdesk reviews significant new ballet DVDs plus some Christmas dance treats. Our reviewers are Ismene Brown and David Nice.Even in a few years, standards of light Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 marathon. Should the Stasi at Bag Search at the Opera House entrance insist on the potty being checked into the cloakroom, the canny adult carries a supersized handkerchief as backup, to stuff into the child’s wailing mouth when - 30 minutes in, with infant acuity - it realises that it has seen the best bits and there are another 40 minutes of these Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 sexual urges (The Judas Tree, My Brother, My Sisters), accusing polite society as a force for evil (Mayerling, Las Hermanas), smashing the porcelain in ballet’s china cupboard. Even his two most popular and conventional achievements, Romeo and Juliet and Manon, take the classical ballet model and shake it hard into a modern world of rebellious sex that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 popular artists are generally divided by an insuperable wall; often there’s a sell-out of some kind when the great elite artist achieves wider popularity, the dancer gets cocky or vulgar or goes on too long. But I have to exempt Acosta from that.At Sadler’s Wells this week he is showing just what a ballet-dancer’s ballet-dancer he is. In an evening that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 quickly. There was the quivery BBC anno at the start that there would be scenes “of a sexual nature”, and hop-skip-jump the couple were at it like rabbits straight after their first performance together.After that things got considerably more complicated, and far more enjoyable. Following the disaster that was Gracie! last week, I fully expected Read more ...
ian.palmer
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 awesomeness of the Tchaikovsky score, are realised upon the stage and shown in its dances with a childlike sense of fantasy. The Christmas tree rises, the rats play, the snow-goose flies - and the audience gasps.John F Macfarlane’s designs begin with the rich ochre-red colours of the Stahlbaums’ interior (silk-lined walls, velvet curtains) and its Read more ...
sheila.johnston
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 long, lean frame and elegant swan neck, she looks more like a dancer than the rather more compact Peggy Hookham of Reigate (as Fonteyn started out in life). But Duff is a tremendously versatile actress, "one of the best around," according to the director Otto Bathurst, who chose her to play the prima ballerina assoluta, in Margot, his biopic which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 Birmingham Royal Ballet, Elvis cartoons at English National Ballet, and expressionist German psychodrama at Scottish Ballet.Three of Britain's most famous designers, Gerald Scarfe, Antony McDonald and John F Macfarlane, talk here about their preoccupations as they set about picturing the fairytale ballet, and in the gallery elsewhere see a fabulous Read more ...