Royal Ballet
Mayerling, The Royal BalletThursday, 06 June 2013
So last night the Royal Ballet’s first couple, at shockingly short notice, gave their last performance with the company, in MacMillan’s Mayerling, a terrifying, piteous experience that I know I’ll never see surpassed. Johan Kobborg and Alina... Read more... |
Raven Girl, Royal Ballet/ Witch-Hunt, Bern Ballett/ The Great Gatsby, Northern BalletSaturday, 25 May 2013
Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern Ballett, both in the Royal Opera House complex, and Northern Ballet’s visit to London with David Nixon’... Read more... |
Mayerling, The Royal Ballet/ Le Jeune Homme et La Mort, English National BalletSunday, 21 April 2013
The acting tradition is refined in British ballet to a height not matched anywhere else in the world - distilled in Frederick Ashton’s ballets, expanded in Kenneth MacMillan’s. This repertoire has produced a stream of exceptional dance actors over... Read more... |
La Bayadère, The Royal BalletSunday, 07 April 2013
Jane Austen would approve, I think, of the plot of La Bayadère, which is about class and wealth getting in the way of love. She might have difficulty with the setting. It is a grand, exotically located ballet offering us an fantastical India of... Read more... |
Still Shocking - The Rite of Spring 100 Years OnMonday, 01 April 2013
Victims driven to death by the mob, women and men violently rutting in animal costumes, a black comedy about a snatched baby, a naked man dancing alone in his own fantasy - many and varied are the images in the nearly 200 danceworks created to the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Moscow: Sergei Polunin triumphs in MayerlingMonday, 25 March 2013
Quite simply, the performance was one of those rarest of events in the theatre that will be talked about for generations - the Russian premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, with the former Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin making his debut... Read more... |
The Metamorphosis, Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 19 March 2013
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Franz Kafka gives birth to a startling hallucinogenic premise. And... Read more... |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2013), Royal BalletSaturday, 16 March 2013
Art is a fickle subject – hence why many preeminent philosophers offer different theories as to how we can begin to understand the opposing effect the same object or creation can have on different people. Many can be mildly affected by a given... Read more... |
The Royal Ballet, 2013-14 SeasonThursday, 14 March 2013
The Royal Ballet's 2013-14 season will open with Carlos Acosta's much-anticipated production of the virtuoso comic 19th-century ballet Don Quixote, the first of a traditional classical-looking year with modest openings for new work. Prime among... Read more... |
Apollo/ New Ratmansky/ New Wheeldon, Royal BalletSaturday, 23 February 2013
Two world premieres in one night is almost more pressure than anyone can bear - choreographers, commissioning company or audience. Still more when the spotlit dancemakers are probably the two top Western names in the art, Alexei Ratmansky and... Read more... |
Sylvie Guillem on resurrecting Marguerite & ArmandTuesday, 19 February 2013
There's grand larceny afoot in the Royal Opera House. Two of today's stars are stealing Fonteyn and Nureyev's signature ballet, and they're leaving some spectators' cherished beliefs shattered in pieces around them. On Thursday, for the last time,... Read more... |
La Valse/ Monotones/ Marguerite & Armand, Royal BalletWednesday, 13 February 2013
Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in... Read more... |
