London Coliseum
Ismene Brown
“It’ll be tricky to write about,” said the man next to me last night, a Cubaphile. “It's the good, the bad and the awful.” The Cubans’ second programme, The Magic of Dance, is an old-fashioned warhorse of showstoppers from the classics, a tapas bar of Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Coppelia, Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Gottschalk Symphony. Come again, the last one? It’s a company conga by Alicia Alonso. Enough said.The awful we know about - epitomised by last week’s Swan Lake, the bodging of text and exigencies of decor, permissible to put down to accidents of history and economics. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the Cuban National Ballet’s Swan Lake fourth act, the corps of swans do a curious, aggressive attacking run you don’t see in any other production - they lower their heads and charge at Prince Siegfried, with hands fluttering angrily behind them, as if they were the evil magicians, not the creatures under a spell. There is a spell cast over the Cuban Ballet, a 60-year-old spell, which was once a force of astounding light and artistic release, but which is declining into depression.Alicia Alonso will be 90 this year, and the miracle-worker who gave birth to Cuba’s amazing incarnation as one Read more ...
james.woodall
It's a short run, in London, but a sweet one. At the Coliseum, English National Ballet's revival of a 1971 Giselle is a showcase for a company on exceptionally calibrated form, offering audiences a taste of its myriad talent over six more shows after Wednesday's opening [the cast changes each time - Ismene Brown reviews a second cast below]. On the evidence of the latter, I'd gladly go to all of them: soloists can either shine or die on their feet in this most intricate of Romantic ballets, and if time were not the defeating beast it usually is, it'd be hugely instructive to see over five Read more ...
David Nice
If your heart feels frozen while the ice glitters outside, warm it by reading Hans Christian Andersen's sharp, witty and enchanting fairy-tale The Snow Queen, or listen to the best bits of Prokofiev's erratic but often characteristic late ballet The Stone Flower. You could also drag yourself out into the cold to face Michael Corder's full-length choreography based on the Andersen story, selectively fitted to chunks of the Prokofiev score and interspersing them with other lyric highlights of the composer's Soviet period, but that would have to be a third-best option.Something ought to have Read more ...