fri 04/04/2025

Royal Ballet

Boy George and rapper Wale to sing live in Royal Ballet's upcoming premiere

Boy George will be in a live line-up of singer-performers for the latest Royal Ballet premiere by Wayne McGregor. Mark Ronson's cycle of nine love songs, orchestrated by Rufus Wainwright, will be performed by the former Culture Club New-Romantic (he...

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Romeo and Juliet, Royal Ballet

Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all...

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Russian Ballet Icons Gala: Celebrating Anna Pavlova, London Coliseum

Fokine, the founding choreographer of the Ballets Russes, wrote on Anna Pavlova’s death, “Pavlova will be the dream of many generations, a dream of beauty, of the gladness of movement.” The superb array of international stars of ballet last night...

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The Dream/ Song of the Earth, Royal Ballet

Oberon in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream was the hurdle at which the ferociously promising young Sergei Polunin refused when he quit the Royal Ballet last week, and whether it was the deceptive complexity and difficulty of it that caused his sudden...

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Men in Motion, Sadler's Wells Theatre

Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that...

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Door left ajar for Royal Ballet star who quit

The young Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, Covent Garden's most remarkable male discovery for years, has quit the company in a stunning shock that today sent consternation throughout the ballet world from the USA to Japan. But tonight Royal Opera...

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Draft Works, Royal Ballet, Linbury Studio

A few years ago, the word was that a new choreographer was showing interesting things. His name was Liam Scarlett, and although he was very young, some work that had been seen in a workshop was looking promising. It was not long before “promising”...

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2011: Mariinsky, Manon, and a German Dane

Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any...

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2011: Ballerinas, Cuts and the Higgs Boson Theory

The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell...

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Christmas Dance on Cinema, TV & Radio

No more is dance the preserve of the few sitting in the theatre - larger companies are leaping hungrily for TV and now cinema screens, having found various ways around the longstanding obstacle of copyright. The BBC is experimenting with live 3D...

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The Nutcracker, Royal Ballet

The Nutcracker, if this isn’t too much of a mixed culinary metaphor, divides audiences like Marmite: love it or hate it. Usually it’s the critics who hate it, and for them it is often only the annual round of Nuts to be Cracked that wears on the...

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Royal Ballet, Asphodel Meadows/Enigma Variations/Gloria

“Over the top” is a curious expression. Originating in World War One, to mean going over the edge of a trench and into battle, it has altered by degrees to mean anything extravagant or outrageous. And Gloria, which is arguably Kenneth MacMillan’s...

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