ballet
Charlie Stone
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection. It is this sculpture and the story behind it that Camille Laurens explores in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose immersive translation by Willard Wood conveys a deeply Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The odd-couple comedy duo is a time-tested concept, and Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan have discovered a chemistry that works. Rob is the giggling excitable one, while Romesh, aided by a sleepy right eye which conveys a sense of harsh judgmentalism, adds a blast of deadpan scepticism.Previously, the pair have squared up to such topics as Usain Bolt, fashion and country music, but they started this second series (Sky 1) with a leap off a very high cliff. They decided they were going to perform in a ballet, and persuaded Birmingham Royal Ballet to let them have a go at appearing in Swan Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The latest in Sadler’s Wells’ Digital Stage programme – an impressively assembled online offering to keep audiences entertained during the shutdown – is balletLORENT’s family-friendly dance-theatre production Rumpelstiltskin. It was streamed as a "matinee" on Friday afternoon, and is available to watch for free on Sadler’s Wells’ Facebook and YouTube for a week.The 90-minute work, first seen in 2018 and filmed for broadcast at Northern Stage, was the third successful collaboration between director Liv Lorent and then poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy – once again Read more ...
Sue Gaisford
Just when you thought Christmas was well and truly over, along comes another box of delights. And there isn’t a disappointment in it. If it were nuts, there’d be nothing but cashews; if chocolates, there wouldn’t be a single disgusting lime-cream. It would be all Ferrero Rochers, gift-wrapped. English National Ballet’s 70th birthday party opened and closed with class, in every sense.The lights went down and “Good morning, class”, we heard, as the regular daily routine at the barre began. There followed a seamless programme of vignettes and titbits, memories and displays of virtuosity, more Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In featuring ordinary people and things rather than magic curses or avenging ghosts, Coppélia stands apart in the canon of 19th century ballets. The only mystery about this delightful old production is why the Royal Ballet has not programmed it for more than a decade. For not only does it make a joyful end-of-year alternative to The Nutcracker but arguably a better first-ballet experience – and Covent Garden is pushing accessibility right now.The ballet’s title refers not to its feisty heroine but to a life-size dummy – a mechanical doll positioned in the window of its maker, the inventor Dr Read more ...
Concerto/Enigma Variations/Raymonda Act III, Royal Ballet review - time to cheer the corps de ballet
Jenny Gilbert
As a mood-lifter, it’s hard to beat the opening of Concerto. Against a primrose sky, figures in daffodil, tangerine and brick form lozenges of fizzing colour, foregrounded by a leading couple so buoyant their heels barely ever touch down. Kenneth MacMillan’s response to Shostakovich’s sunny Second Piano Concerto makes a brilliant start to the first mixed bill of the new Royal Ballet season, a bill that unites three productions first seen at Covent Garden in the mid-1960s, although from their wildly contrasting styles you would never guess.In its outer movements Concerto gives the whole Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This programme of three short works is all about influence, specifically the supposed cross currents between ballet and contemporary dance in the latter half of the 20th century. The irony is that this is the first time that the Royal Ballet has presented a piece made by the great American dance pioneer and experimenter Merce Cunningham, whose centenary this marks. Had they not thought him relevant before now?Still, better late than never. This trio of ballets – a compact, early-ish work by Cunningham, a contemporaneous one by Frederick Ashton, and a world premiere by New Yorker Pam Tanowitz Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Ballet’s choice of season opener could be dismissed as safe and predictable. But as the glorious naturalistic detail of 1830s Paris unfolds in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 retelling, you see the reasoning. It’s only a year since the Royal Opera House remodelled its ground floor spaces to be more welcoming, and Manon is the ideal first-time ballet. It has everything – glamour, history, a fast-moving love story crackling with illicit sex, crime and social injustice. And it has MacMillan’s choreography, the like of which – in terms of examining the human heart in all its waywardness – Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It might seem odd to laud the entrances and exits of a ballet, but when it comes to stagecraft Christopher Wheeldon is second to none. You lose count of the ingenious ways he finds to shift up to 130 dancers in and out of view at the Albert Hall. Wheeldon created his three-act Cinderella in 2012 for a conventional stage, but for English National Ballet he has reworked it for this vast, non-theatrical O. For once, the wheels of Cinders’ carriage have space to roll.The down side is that the narrative feels overstretched and thin in spite of the pyrotechnics that have been thrown at it – massive Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has come a long way since his early days as a hip hop artist, but the outsider status is obvious even before the curtain goes up on Medusa, his first commission for the Royal Ballet and the centrepiece of a triple bill showcasing the company’s contemporary side.Cherkaoui’s choice of subject – the ultimate #MeToo story of classical myth – rules out the usual ballet tropes. Far from being a love story, Medusa’s is a tale of power abuse times two. Sexual violation by a powerful male (the god Poseidon), is followed by punishment meted out by a second authority figure who Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
She does indeed persist, that remarkable Tamara Rojo. Dismayed by the fact that, in 20 years as a dancer, she had never performed a ballet made by a woman, she mounted a triple bill called She Said, featuring only work by and about women. That 2016 conversation is resumed in English National Ballet’s current spring showing at Sadler’s Wells which revives the best of those commissions – Broken Wings, a phantasmagorical tour through the life of the artist Frida Kahlo – along with a sell-out hit from two years ago, the Pina Bausch version of The Rite of Spring. There’s a new work too, a dance Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Genius is as genius does, and Rudolf Nureyev made sure nobody was left in any doubt about the scale of either his talents or his ambitions. Based on Julie Kavanagh's biography Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, The White Crow pairs director and actor Ralph Fiennes with screenwriter David Hare to deliver an involving and often thrilling account of Nureyev’s rise to fame as a ballet dancer and his sensational defection to the West in 1961. It pulls off the tricky feat of being both successful drama and a plausible depiction of the rarefied world of ballet.In its recounting of Nureyev’s life from Read more ...