Royal Ballet
Best of 2014: Dance & BalletWednesday, 31 December 2014
You usually know a good piece or performance when you see one, but sometimes you only identify a great one as such significantly after the fact. What better way to test a work's durability, then, than by seeing what remains of it in the memory after... Read more... |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2014), Royal BalletSunday, 07 December 2014
Christopher Wheeldon’s hard-working mix of skewed classical ballet, vaudeville and Victorian theatrical magic achieved through state-of-the-art technique wasn’t much liked by theartsdesk’s critics on its first and second outings. Marvelling at it on... Read more... |
Don Quixote, Royal BalletWednesday, 26 November 2014
The 1871 ballet that goes by the name of Don Quixote has always been a challenge to stage. Barely a tenth of its two hours-plus concerns the titular knight and his crackpot wanderings. The rest is fixed like a town hall security camera on the non-... Read more... |
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... |
Manon, Royal BalletSaturday, 27 September 2014
In a moment of wild fantasy, I thought I might try and write a whole review of Manon without mentioning sex. After all, there’s plenty of other stuff going on in Kenneth MacMillan’s tale, which last night at the Royal Opera House celebrated 40 years... 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... |
Serenade/Sweet Violets/DGV, Royal BalletThursday, 15 May 2014
Some artists acquire (or create) cults of personality because – Byron, Wagner or Van Gogh – they are just so obviously fruity. Some others, though less fruity, are venerated because their work is so tear-prickingly astonishing that we are desperate... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Lighting Designer Michael HullsMonday, 14 April 2014
Last night the Olivier Awards handed their top honour for dance not to a dancer but to the man who shines the lights on the dancers. Michael Hulls, winner of the Outstanding Achievement in Dance award, paints the dancing of Sylvie Guillem, Akram... Read more... |
The Winter's Tale, Royal BalletFriday, 11 April 2014
Another week, another major British ballet company takes on a key cultural patrimony in a brand-new work. It might seem odd that the Royal Ballet’s new Winter’s Tale generates more critical reservations than English National Ballet’s take on... Read more... |
BBC Ballet SeasonMonday, 10 March 2014
There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was... Read more... |
TV Preview: BBC Ballet SeasonSaturday, 01 March 2014
Do four programmes constitute a season? Let's not quibble too much; though brief, the ballet season airing on BBC2 and BBC4 this week has some appealing offerings. Judging from the strong focus on famous names (Fonteyn, Bussell) and the best... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Royal BalletSunday, 23 February 2014
Clement Crisp, veteran ballet critic, once expressed his appreciation for Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet by saying that “if one had to throw ballets off the back of a sleigh, this would be the last to go.” Charming though the train of thought was that... Read more... |
