Sylvie Guillem
Jenny Gilbert
It’s hard to think of anyone even half as persistent as William Forsythe in changing the conversation around ballet. The American choreographer first came to notice with what became the defining dancework of the late 1980s.In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated tugged ballet off-kilter and weaponised the pointe shoe to render it lean, mean and dangerous, especially when Sylvie Guillem was wearing it. From then on, Forsythe’s rule-breaking gathered pace until the stuff he was making for his own company looked dysmorphic, limbs wrenched into painful angles, music swapped for spoken text. Now 75, he’s Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It was business as usual in the British dance world in 2015. Looking back over the year, theartsdesk's dance critics see the industry's many talented, capable people continuing to do their jobs well, but we don't recall being shaken, stirred or surprised as often as in other years, or at least not by new works: our top moments of the year are concentrated in the farewells of great dancers Sylvie Guillem and Carlos Acosta, and in classic productions of classic ballets.What follows is our personal map of 2015's dance uplands. As usual with such lists, it doesn't tell the whole story. For Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sylvie Guillem is retiring in exactly the same way as she does everything: in her own time and on her own terms. She turns 50 this year, but it’s not that age is finally catching up with her – at least, not in her body, which she acknowledges has potentially many more years of dancing in it. She just wants to go out at the top of her game, and for this most intelligent of ballerinas, that also means a new programme: no easy wallowing in the back catalogue for her, but new commissions from Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, receiving their UK première in this run at the Wells, which will be Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There is a special poignancy to these performances of Sacred Monsters, Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan's terrific 2006 joint show. Guillem, the former Paris Opéra étoile and Royal Ballet prima ballerina whose singular talent has lit up contemporary dance for the last decade, announced in October that she will be retiring from the stage for good in 2015. Sitting in Sadler's Wells last night I was achingly conscious not only that this was probably the last time I would see Sacred Monsters, but also one of the now vanishingly small number of opportunities left ever to watch Guillem, one of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 Khan, Russell Maliphant and the Ballet Boyz with atmospheres and illuminations that seem to reach beyond the visual and into some paranormal place.Lighting designers are either wizards or useful pedants. They scrupulously light the action or they make light speak its own language, activating space, time, illusion, imagination - inventing effects that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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, Marguerite and Armand will be danced as a farewell to the Royal Ballet by its departed favourites, Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin, whose interpretations of the dying courtesan and her tragically hotheaded young lover have shown the heights that ballet can reach in deceiving spectators with purple romance.The ballet was created by Sir Frederick Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The star ballerina Sylvie Guillem was rehearsing in London when she heard about the cataclysmic Japanese earthquake last spring, and the devastating tsunami in its aftermath. It was an apocalyptic blow that she felt personally. Since her first visit there as a teenager, the internationally renowned dancer has been drawn back to Japan year after year, winning legions of friends and supporters, the culture’s aesthetic clarity and spareness influencing her taste, and complementing her own evolution from classical ballerina assoluta into contemporary dancer stupenda.Her current show, 6000 Miles Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sylvie Guillem is back, chicken-skinny, middle-aged, dressed like a dowd. Did I just write that? And let’s add: as swift as mercury, as exact as a feather, as light as the sun, and as eternal in intelligent beauty as Nefertiti. In contemporary dance, as I was saying at the weekend, it should be permissible to sit in the dark wondering at the inexplicable and the unbelievable. This great ballerina of our era is both inexplicable and unbelievable, in physique and in temperament. Not least incredible is that a Parisienne of 46 would allow herself to appear in two outfits that compete Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The phenomenal French ballerina Sylvie Guillem (b. 1965) has always been a modern woman, for all her classical ballerina dress. She joined the Royal Ballet in 1989 from Nureyev's Paris Opera Ballet, on terms of strictest independence, hardly saying a word to the press, while her image as a brilliant but truculent "Mademoiselle Non" grew and grew. The image belies the person, though - once you meet her, what’s striking is her lack of side, unblinkered intelligence and polite but firm candour.This first of four interviews dates from December 1995 when the world’s most imitated classical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With five first-magnitude stars in it you're expecting at least a five-star show from Eonnagata, the collaboration between ballerina Sylvie Guillem, theatre director Robert Lepage, choreographer Russell Maliphant, designer Alexander McQueen and lighting genius Michael Hulls - possibly even the Milky Way. But I can't divvy up more than two stars for the result. There is too much courteous mutual admiration going on to allow light to shine as theatre, with the exception of some of the last minutes of the 90, which are blindingly good and left me gnashing my teeth at what could have been Read more ...