contemporary dance
Hush/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 10 November 2010
“Nice is different from good,” sings one of Stephen Sondheim’s characters. And mostly, it is different, “nice” rarely being “good”. Christopher Bruce, however, blows that theory right out of the water, because Hush, his 2006 piece which opens... Read more... |
The Featherstonehaughs, The PlaceMonday, 08 November 2010
It’s a reasonable argument, I'd say, that it is only worth going out to see dance, or anything else, if it’s probably going to be better than telly or conversation with friends. And only if it’s also worth spending a couple of hours travel by... Read more... |
Emanuel Gat Dance, Sadler's Wells/ Henri Oguike Dance, TouringTuesday, 02 November 2010
How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own?... Read more... |
Iphigenie auf Tauris, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsFriday, 29 October 2010
Iphigenia is an abandoned child, almost murdered by her father, lost in bewilderment, captured and indoctrinated in an artificial existence. It hardly matters that her father was the legendary Greek hero Agamemnon, her mother the notorious... Read more... |
Nearly Ninety, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Barbican TheatreTuesday, 26 October 2010
I’ll retain lifelong, life-changing memories of the joyous mysteries of Merce Cunningham’s dances, so it’s unimportant for me that Nearly Ninety, his final creation before his death last year, won’t be one of them. Naturally his company brought it... Read more... |
Q&A Special: The Late Merce CunninghamTuesday, 26 October 2010
Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly... Read more... |
Trisha Brown Dance Company, Tate Modern & Queen Elizabeth HallWednesday, 20 October 2010
A snaky conga of women in white pantsuits snuggling their loins together in a Spanish dance, and wiggling their way along a wall behind a Joseph Beuys installation may well be one of the indelible sights of my dance year. Mine, and that of only a... Read more... |
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Cow Piece/ Akram Khan, Vertical Road, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 13 October 2010
The annual Dance Umbrella festival is mostly for the dance industry to talk to itself, I’ve come to feel, with a timetable so closely packed that only Londoners, and specifically those in the tight roaring circle of the know, will get to sample much... Read more... |
The Art of Touch/ Awakenings/ Cardoon Club, Rambert Dance, Wycombe SwanWednesday, 06 October 2010
The Blitz may be about to descend on dance in theatres, but Rambert have the authentic British grit under fire. They truck on into a bleak autumn with the courage to present to the straitened nation a new commission of music and dance, and a new... Read more... |
Production Gallery: Russell Maliphant's AfterLightThursday, 30 September 2010
New photographs by Charlotte MacMillan of Russell Maliphant's expanded Afterlight, a mesmerising new dancework premiered at Sadler's Wells this week. The portfolio adds stills from the substantial new sections to ones she took a year ago of the... Read more... |
Russell Maliphant Company, AfterLight, Sadler's WellsThursday, 30 September 2010
We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a... Read more... |
Carlos Acosta, Premieres, London ColiseumSunday, 01 August 2010
Great stars get lost sometimes. Up there in outer space, ringed with adulation, when they get a mid-life crisis sometimes they get sucked into a vanity black hole. No light emits, just the tatters of an angel who lost his way in his own legend.... Read more... |
