A new Giselle? Not quite: the production that Japan’s national company has brought over for its first British visit isn’t a radical Akram Khan-style makeover. What it offers is a tasteful refreshing of a great classic, like meeting an old friend with a new haircut. This is a Giselle with many local connections. Behind it is the company’s artistic director, Miyako Yoshida, a favourite principal at both Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet, where she danced the title role many times. Staging and additional steps are by the Royal Ballet dancer turned choreographer Alastair Marriott Read more ...

It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...

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 ...

In uncertain times like these, the single thing that every flagship ballet company needs is a convincing iteration of a 19th-century blockbuster. New works are all very well and necessary, but they don’t have the pulling power of Swan Lake, or the staying power. The Royal Ballet’s previous production served the company well for three decades, more than justifying the original investment.Happily for the ballet-going public (which includes in large part the foreign visitors that Jeremy Hunt is suddenly so keen to impress), the Royal's punt on a 30-year-old choreographer, Liam Scarlett, in Read more ...

Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process.With the help of the painter Hein Heckroth and the composer Brian Easland, both of whom won Oscars for their work on the film – not to mention Robert Helpmann’s almost Freudian choreography – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger combined words and images and music and movement to produce a “total artwork” that illuminates the unconscious as well Read more ...

As 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 reconstruct the person's age, state of health, status – perhaps even enough detail on the face to bring the dead features back to life and a guess at personality? Properly mummified, a human body can yield an extraordinary amount of living information after thousands of years. But ballets vanish far quicker.Stop performing a ballet for a decade and a Read more ...

Popular musicians “going classical” can work well. Look at Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, at Richard Reed Parry and Colin Stetson from Arcade Fire, or at the late Jóhann Jóhannsson who had a successful career as indie and electronic musician in Iceland before becoming a globally beloved orchestral composer. Of course the boundaries are flimsy anyway these days, with the likes of Max Richter, Nils Frahm and Anna Meredith existing comfortably with one foot in the concert hall and one in the gig venue. Crucially, each of these artists has been able to negotiate their own position among all this, Read more ...

So there’s this prince, see, and he’s not at all happy. For a start, he never got over losing a parent when he was a child. He’s at odds with the world, sick to death with royal protocol and convinced that no one understands him. Worse, having too much time on his hands, he suffers from delusions. Meet Prince Siegfried, who found his soulmate, and met his nemesis, on a moonlit night by a lake.It can’t be long before some ballet company mounts a Swan Lake with a bearded prince in a ginger wig, but it won’t be English National Ballet that does it. That company is too respectful of the memory of Read more ...

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 ...

“That’s Marcelino Sambé, he’s wonderful,” said the artistic administrator of the Royal Ballet as I followed her down one of the many corridors that weave throughout the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. “He’s a newly promoted Principal, a very special talent indeed!” I looked over my shoulder at the figure disappearing through some doors. I had been at The Royal Ballet for over a week making a documentary for BBC Four about a golden generation of male stars but as yet had not met any dancers.Access documentaries to institutions such as this take months of negotiation and it’s not uncommon Read more ...

It’s unlikely that Lord Byron would recognise much about Le Corsaire. Beyond the characters’ names and the Ottoman location, there is little trace of the 1814 bestselling verse-novel on whose fame the ballet hitched a ride. Its plot is very silly indeed – a tale of abducted slave girls and piratical derring-do with added 19th-century ballet tropes of poisoned flowers and opium-induced dreams, not to mention a shipwreck in the final three minutes. It’s the kind of hokum it normally takes a big Russian company to bring off, but in this revival of Anna-Marie Holmes’s 2013 production English Read more ...

Why is Alexei Ratmansky one of the greatest living choreographers of classical ballet? Well partly because, as last night's performance of The Bright Stream by the Bolshoi at the Royal Opera House proved, he can do comedy. To adapt the famous aphorism for ballet: sententious abstract dance is easy, even Swan Lake is comparatively easy, but doing physical comedy well enough to raise belly laughs from a very smart, high-culture crowd is hard, hard, hard. Ashton could do it; Robbins could do it; and The Bright Stream puts Ratmansky in their distinguished company.Somewhat suprisingly, The Bright Read more ...