ballet
Jewels, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 13 August 2013
The Bolshoi’s summer season in London has so far been straight-down-the-line trad: Swan Lake as an opener, Bayadère, Sleeping Beauty. Now, however, with Balanchine’s Jewels, they’ve at least dipped a pointe shoe into the 20th century, if rather... Read more... |
Mayerling, Royal BalletSunday, 16 June 2013
My great-grandmother used to say, "In the fall, leaves fall," meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful... Read more... |
Mangan, Royal Academy Opera Students, BBCSO, Denève, Barbican HallSaturday, 27 April 2013
Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite... Read more... |
Laurencia, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London ColiseumWednesday, 03 April 2013
It’s not often you go to a ballet to watch a history lesson unfold, but Laurencia, the 1939 Soviet ballet choreographed by Vakhtang Chabukiani, gives us exactly that, and a gripping one under the froth and fun.Based on the 17th-century playwright... Read more... |
Don Quixote, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London ColiseumSunday, 31 March 2013
If you want virtuosity, there’s only one place to be in London right now, and that’s watching the Mikhailovsky’s fine production of that demented old warhorse, Don Quixote, with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev in the leads.Don Quixote is one... Read more... |
Giselle, Mikhailovsky Ballet, London ColiseumWednesday, 27 March 2013
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual... Read more... |
Russian Ballet Icons Gala: Celebrating Vaslav Nijinsky, London ColiseumMonday, 11 March 2013
What does _ _ _ _ mean to you? What does _ _ _ _ mean to us all? Questions asked every day by all kinds of people the world over. These same questions were posed last night at the London Coliseum about the doyen of 20th-century dance and... Read more... |
Apollo/ New Ratmansky/ New Wheeldon, Royal BalletSaturday, 23 February 2013
Two world premieres in one night is almost more pressure than anyone can bear - choreographers, commissioning company or audience. Still more when the spotlit dancemakers are probably the two top Western names in the art, Alexei Ratmansky and... Read more... |
La Valse/ Monotones/ Marguerite & Armand, Royal BalletWednesday, 13 February 2013
Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in... Read more... |
Imagine: A Beauty is Born, BBC OneWednesday, 19 December 2012
They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a... Read more... |
Kenneth MacMillan Died 20 Years AgoFriday, 16 November 2012
It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely been held to be the realm of sweetness and majesty.... Read more... |
Viscera/Infra/Fool's Paradise, Royal BalletSunday, 04 November 2012
A new Liam Scarlett ballet has become an event, even as, in this case, Scarlett’s home company, the Royal Ballet, is recreating a work he choreographed last January for Miami City Ballet – the young choreographer’s first international commission.In... Read more... |
