contemporary ballet
Ceremony of Innocence/The Age of Anxiety/Aeternum, Royal BalletSaturday, 08 November 2014
English National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet have staged programmes of war pieces already this year; now here's the Royal Ballet bringing up the rear in its own inimitable (and rather oblique) fashion with a triple bill that picks up on and... Read more... |
Cassandra, Ludovic Ondiviela, Royal Ballet, Linbury StudioFriday, 31 October 2014
Madness is a favourite trope of opera, less so of ballet. There’s Giselle, but her insanity lasts only a few minutes. There’s Kenneth MacMillan’s delusional Anastasia, who believes she's the daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, but the advent of DNA... Read more... |
The Murmuring/ Metheus/ Mesmerics, BalletBoyz, Linbury Studio TheatreWednesday, 17 September 2014
The fabulous dancers known as BalletBoyz The Talent 2014 looked so at home in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre last night that it was hard to believe they had never performed there before. The BalletBoyz themselves, Michael Nunn and... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2014: MurleyDanceThursday, 21 August 2014
MurleyDance is something of an oddity in the world of small independent dance companies, in that it proudly wears pointe shoes. Yes, this is – according to its own publicity - the only professional classical ballet company attending the Fringe, and... Read more... |
Solo for Two, Osipova/Vasiliev, London ColiseumThursday, 07 August 2014
Mounting a contemporary dance show together doesn’t seem like the best way to get over your ex, even if you are (or rather, were) ballet’s most fabulously marketable couple. But whatever their real-life relationship, audiences will always be keen –... Read more... |
Fallen/Serpent, BalletBoyz, RoundhouseFriday, 01 August 2014
School’s out for summer, even Parliament is on recess, and the streets around my house are suddenly devoid of children, as families make for the hills (or at least the beach). It should be dead season for all but prommers (and the suffering... Read more... |
Restless Creature, Wendy Whelan, Linbury Studio TheatreThursday, 24 July 2014
If you’ve reached the top of your profession and then spent twenty years there, retiring is going to be hard. It will be many times harder if, like New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan, you were only twenty-four when you reached that rank,... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Paris: San Francisco Ballet 2Friday, 18 July 2014
Having a strong company style is usually no bad thing, especially if – as with San Francisco Ballet – the main component of it is a commitment to excellence. It has been impressive watching the gritty energy with which, night after night, the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Paris: San Francisco Ballet 1Thursday, 17 July 2014
In 2005, San Francisco Ballet were the first company to visit Paris as part of a new summer dance festival, Les Étés de la Danse. Helped not only by this auspicious start, but by the obvious demand for live dance in a month traditionally barren for... Read more... |
Sehnsucht/Schmetterling, Nederlands Dans Theater 1, Sadler's WellsTuesday, 01 July 2014
No one could accuse Nederlands Danse Theater choreographers Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot for thinking inside of the box. And yet that's exactly where they've placed their dancers in the opening piece, Sehnsucht, of this impressive Sadler's Wells... Read more... |
Swan Lake, Dada Masilo, Sadler's WellsThursday, 19 June 2014
There are all sorts of companies and shows out there that claim to “rock” the ballet, or otherwise shake up, take down or reinvent an art form that, they imply, is (breathe it softly, the dirty word) elitist, or at least irrelevant. Few, I’d imagine... Read more... |
The Dream/Connectome/The Concert, Royal BalletSaturday, 07 June 2014
The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history... Read more... |
