choreographers
National Ballet of Canada, Sadler's Wells review - see this, and know what dance can doSaturday, 05 October 2024What to expect of the National Ballet of Canada since its last London visit 11 years ago? Dance with an eco-message, a world-peace message, or more visible diversity on stage?It's all there in the homegrown triple bill the company has brought to... Read more... |
MacMillan Celebrated, Royal Ballet review - out of mothballs, three vintage works to marvel atSaturday, 06 April 2024Triple bills can be a difficult sell for ballet companies. Audiences prefer big sets and costumes, and a storyline they can hum. It’s not hard to see why Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening hits Romeo and Juliet and Manon have turned out to be such a... Read more... |
The Mongol Khan, London Coliseum review - unique operatic spectacle utterly overwhelms flaws in pacing and storyWednesday, 22 November 2023“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but... Read more... |
Hunting legendary treasure with ballet's Indiana Jones - Pierre Lacotte 1932-2023Wednesday, 19 April 2023As any archaeologist knows, digging up a sarcophagus is a nailbiting business. How small are the chances that inside the shredded linen wrappings will lie a recognisable body with some vestiges of its former life upon it?Enough DNA and bone to... Read more... |
Creature review - Asif Kapadia shines light on a dark dance pieceFriday, 24 February 2023Filmed ballets involve a different way of watching: you may know a piece well, but you aren’t used to staring into its lead dancers’ eyes as they perform their roles. Not all dancers give good close-up, either. But a new film by the Oscar-winning... Read more... |
Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, Sadler's Wells review - a gothic romance with loads of goth and not much loveSaturday, 17 December 2022Matthew Bourne is not the first choreographer to tinker with the story of The Sleeping Beauty and he won't be the last, such is the lure of Tchaikovsky's score and the potency of the plot.Good and evil, beauty and decrepitude, the suspended... Read more... |
NDT2, Sadler's Wells review - a diverse triple billFriday, 18 February 2022It's not every junior dance company that could sell out a house at Sadler's Wells. But NDT2 – younger sibling of one of Europe’s top contemporary dance ensembles, Nederlands Dans Theater, have grown over the last 35 years into a box office... Read more... |
Richard Alston Dance Company, Final Edition, Sadler's Wells review - farewell and thank you, Sir RichardTuesday, 10 March 2020Hard as it is to imagine the British dance landscape without Richard Alston, we’re going to have to get used to it. The touring company that for the past 25 years has been the chief purveyor of his uniquely lyrical brand of contemporary dance... Read more... |
Shostakovich Trilogy, San Francisco Ballet, Sadler's Wells review - less than the sum of its partsSaturday, 01 June 2019Alexei Ratmansky stands out among contemporary choreographers for two reasons: he still creates genuinely classical dance, and he's more conscious than most that art is dependant on the society it's created in. His Shostakovich Trilogy, which... Read more... |
10 Questions for Musician Will GregorySaturday, 04 May 2019Will Gregory (b.1959) is best known as one half of the alt-pop duo Goldfrapp but has a long career in music that dips into many areas. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was a working musician who toured with multiple bands, notably, Tears for Fears... Read more... |
Victoria, Northern Ballet, Sadler's Wells - A queen re-instated, once againThursday, 28 March 2019Given that the life of Queen Victoria spanned the best part of a century, the first task for any biographer is to hack a path through the mountain of facts. It ought to help that the queen was a prolific diarist. Too bad for choreographer Cathy... Read more... |
Suspiria review - kindly, slow-motion grand guignolThursday, 15 November 2018The first Suspiria was a sensation, and spectacularly, monomaniacally new. Its young heroine Susie Bannon’s ride from an innately hostile airport through eldritch woods in which a panicked girl ran from her destination, the Markos Academy of Dance,... Read more... |
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