Frederick Ashton
Sarah Kent
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 ...
Helen Hawkins
Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella? Prokofiev’s two great scores have provided the Royal Ballet with a pair of popular hits, though Macmillan’s R&J has probably been the bigger draw, its Capulets ball music sampled everywhere from TV commercials to Sunderland FC’s pre-match stadium anthem.Cinderella, for me, is the better listen, but is it the better basis for a dance narrative? After a somewhat lacklustre opening night for its latest run at the Royal Opera House, it didn’t seem so. One problem is that, unlike R&J's, the score has a tendency to meander and doodle, stop and start, so Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Launching a four-year global project to proclaim the genius of Frederick Ashton might seem unnecessary. His work is the bedrock of what’s widely known as The English Style and rarely absent from any British ballet season, whether at the Royal Ballet (for whom he created much of it), or elsewhere.But the man was prolific, choreographing more than 100 works across half of the last century, and a large number of them deserve rediscovery. No matter that they were made in and for a very different world – a world of evening gloves and Margot Fonteyn and tea with the Queen Mother: today’s audiences Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s tempting to see the second gala created by Ukrainian-born Ivan Putrov as a reflection of the shift in Ukraine’s fortunes since his first one in March 2022. Somehow, just weeks after Ukraine was invaded, Putrov and his fellow student in Kyiv, Alina Cojocaru, brought the world’s finest principals to the London Coliseum for a show-stopping gala that was as moving as it was finely executed.Now Ukraine languishes for lack of munitions, its hard-won gains in the balance again, and Putrov has had to rally support for his second gala – which funds young arts students in Ukraine – in a fraught Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a critic, I’ve rarely felt compelled to mourn publicly about an artist. Mourning goes somewhere beyond the usual sense of loss and gratitude when someone's death has been announced. But it's the only word when the departed is one of the very few individuals - or their songs or books or pictures - who get in your bloodstream, who get into your optic nerves or your inner ear, who magnify and sharpen your experience of being alive.Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Unfazed by yet another forced cancellation, the Royal Ballet has notched up a small triumph over the virus. When what was to have been a performance to a live audience in the Opera House fell prey to new restrictions, it went ahead anyway. With safety protocols for the dancers and orchestra already in place, as well as plans for filming, the only difference was that the public didn’t have to turn out in the rain. And with a single £10 ticket covering everyone around the TV, what a bargain that has turned out to be.For a start, there is the sheer variety of a programme that includes little- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
You can’t accuse the Royal Ballet of lightweight programming: the three juicy pieces in the triple bill that opened at the Royal Opera House on Tuesday add up to a three-hour running time. That’s a lot of ballet for your buck. Whether they actually go together is another question. Russian-ness is a rather tenuous thread to link the mythic extravaganza of The Firebird, the torrid claustrophobia of Ashton's Month in the Country and the faceted neo-classicism of Balanchine's Symphony in C.A Month in the Country, Frederick Ashton’s throbbing little ode to forbidden passions running high in a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
On paper, the appeal of a Sylvia revival is questionable. If even the choreographer (Frederick Ashton) wasn't sure his 1952 original was worth saving for posterity, do we really want to watch a 2004 reconstruction posthumously pieced together from rehearsal tapes? Especially given that, with its arcadian setting, it totters delicately on the dividing line between delightfully arch and camp as the Queen Mother's curtains? Happily I can report, after last night's performance by the Royal Ballet, that this revival comes down on the right side of the line, and is absolutely worth your time.Sylvia Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Nicely covering the many bases of Frederick Ashton's genius, the Royal Ballet triple bill which opened last night is a chance to see both the company and its founder choreographer on top form. The Dream shows Ashton at his narrative best, handling comedy and kisses with equal aplomb. Symphonic Variations displays his slightly less well-known talent for abstract ballet, and is one of the most enjoyable 20 minutes in the entire repertoire. And Marguerite and Armand commemorates his abiding fascination with Margot Fonteyn, who inspired him more than any other dancer except perhaps Pavlova.The Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Not every artist attains the kind of status that will allow their early works to be revived – or, when revived, greeted with commercial and critical success. This is something of a shame for those of us with a historical mindset who like seeing where an artist has come from and how they have developed. Of course, some things are best left in a box under the bed with your teenage diaries, but Early Adventures, a tight selection of Matthew Bourne works from 1989-1991 which opened last night at Sadler's Wells, is not one of them.The Infernal Galop and Town & Country, both shown in the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In a world of terrifyingly serious news, the opening of the Royal Ballet season with Frederick Ashton's pastoral frolic La Fille mal gardée might seem like a wanton disregard for reality, like a brass band playing "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside" as the Titanic goes down. But that is to misunderstand the reason Fille is so beloved is that it has at its heart a perfectly serious and realistic topic: young love.The ballet's roots are in comédie sérieuse - meaning "true to life" - and it is true to life, in a rose-tinged, shiny photo album sort of way. Most young agricultural swains do Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Perhaps the director of the Royal Ballet is a pigeon fancier? With this January run of The Two Pigeons following hard on the heels of one in November, the Royal Ballet's dancers have spent most of the autumn and winter practising the fluttering, preening and cooing of Ashton's featherweight and featherbrained romance, while anyone wanting to see both Monotones and Rhapsody - paired with Pigeons in November and January respectively - has had to shell out for two tickets and sit through two doses of Pigeons' exhausting whimsy. It's a price even dedicated Ashton lovers might baulk at.I count Read more ...