Valiant souls who have recently read the Margaret Atwood trilogy on which this new Wayne McGregor piece for the Royal Ballet is based will be at home with its time-shifting eco-sci-fi narrative. The rest of us, not so much.The appeal of the basic plot is clear: how big pharma coped with a devastating pandemic that has wreaked havoc on an increasingly plundered Earth. (NB the novels appeared between 2003 and 2013, long before the pandemic; and McGregor’s first planning, collaborating with the National Ballet of Canada, to create a piece on them, began in 2017.) Restocking the world with Read more ...

Dance lovers have had a better time of it this year as the performance sector starts to find its feet again. In the wake of a general cull of independent dance companies, 2023 has seen signs of fresh growth.Lively enterprises have sprouted in unlikely places – a pop-up jazz club at the back of the Royal Festival Hall (Drew McOnie’s Nutcracker), a community hall wedged between Canary Wharf high-rises (Ballet Nights). There have been dance adaptations of texts ancient and modern: Pam Tanowitz’s gorgeous Song of Songs at the Barbican, on the one hand; on the other, The Limit, a kinetic take on a Read more ...

Is it a cop-out for an artist to label a piece of work “Untitled”? Painters and sculptors make a habit of it, reasoning that they want to leave the viewer free to bring to the experience what they will, unhampered and unlimited by prior information. Odd, then, that dance, being such an ambiguous, free-associating art form, should be so far behind the curve.Wayne McGregor’s latest work for the Royal Ballet is the first “Untitled” that I have come across in three decades of watching dance. It is also one of the most exciting new non-narrative ballets in years.Untitled, 2023 is named after the Read more ...

The more Wayne McGregor’s superb Woolf Works is staged, the richer it seems to become. It has started a third run at Covent Garden since its premiere there in 2015, which, considering the house lost over a year of performances, is some achievement. It is the mark of an instant modern classic.The evening begins with the crystal-clear clipped tones of Virginia Woolf herself, recorded by the BBC in 1937, reading from her essay On Craftsmanship. It’s an uncanny start, like being lectured by a ghost. The essay considers the writer’s use of words, and decides new coinages won’t work with an “old” Read more ...

Crisis-management has always been part of a choreographer’s skillset, but staging a new ballet with two large alternating casts has rarely been fraught with so much risk. It was one hell of a week for Valentino Zucchetti, first soloist at the Royal Ballet and creator of Anemoi, the 20-minute work that opens the final programme in the company’s 90th birthday season. In the last days of rehearsals the 33-year-old was already on the back foot, re-jigging sections of the piece as several dancers fell prey to injury. Then, 24 hours before opening night, disaster struck and half his cast were Read more ...

A pas de deux is normally an opportunity for two dancers to express the pinnacle of their skill and the choreographer's art. In the case of McGregor + Mugler, the duet receiving its world premiere as part of a Russian-sponsored triple bill, it became an opportunity for a big-name designer to strut his stuff."My Little Pony From Outer Space" seemed to be the theme as Bolshoi prima ballerina Olga Smirnova and the Royal Ballet’s Edward Watson (main picture, and below) stepped out on the stage of the Coliseum virtually naked but for chrome helmets, chrome shin-guards and a membrane of glittery Read more ...

One day someone will come up with an algorithm for the perfectly balanced triple bill. Until then ballet directors will have to make do with hit or miss. The Royal Ballet’s latest three-part offering would appear to tick the boxes: something old, something new-ish, and something just for fun. Yet while the evening can’t be faulted on the quality of performance, the effect is less than the sum of its parts.The best comes first, with a first revival of Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian Tear, a work created two years ago for an all-male ensemble. As is often the case with this choreographer, nothing is Read more ...

The Royal Ballet last night presented an evening of Bernstein-scored ballets, two of them premieres by Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon and the other a revival of Liam Scarlett's 2014 Age of Anxiety. Celebrated and accessible composer; celebrated and accessible choreographers; nice centenary bandwagon to hitch them to – surely a recipe for triple success?Or triple... not-success. Last night delivered three pieces that didn't do justice to their music, which doesn't exactly spell triumph for a programme focused on a major composer. Neither McGregor nor Wheeldon appears to have been Read more ...

There are two approaches to a triple bill: make all three pieces similar so you get one crowd with definite tastes, or make them very different so you have a chance of pleasing everyone. The Contrasts bill that the Mariinsky ballet showed at the Royal Opera House was, as its title suggests, firmly in the latter camp. Its three pieces spanned over a hundred years of ballet history, from the Imperial classic Paquita via a stylised 1960s Carmen all the way to Wayne McGregor's 2008 Infra.Carmen was created as a vehicle for Maya Plisetskaya, the great Soviet ballerina who died in 2015, and it Read more ...

It shows you just how much Kenneth MacMillan changed ballet in this country that 1960's The Invitation, with its onstage rape, sexual grooming and child abuse, can act as the reassuring classic at the heart of the new Royal Ballet triple bill which opened on Saturday. The Invitation should be – and is – a shocking piece, but when bracketed by Wayne McGregor's brand new Obsidian Tear and Christopher Wheeldon's 2012 Within the Golden Hour, two particularly vapid examples of contemporary ballet, MacMillan's ballet de moeurs, for all its darkness, has a comforting solidity. It reassures us that Read more ...

Wayne McGregor wasn't anyone's idea of a ballet man when he was appointed choreographer in residence at the Royal Ballet in 2007. Before then, and since, his work has been abstract, spiky, verging on dysmorphic. His interest lay not in human stories but in the snap of synapses and the speed with which the brain can relay messages to a hyper-flexible body. Then, two years ago, perhaps sighting the end of that particular road, he made a surprising swerve into narrative with Raven Girl, which last night received its first revival at the Opera House.Raven Girl is a fairytale which pays Read more ...

New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance programme for the first time makes plenty of sense. Since McGregor's frequent collaborator, contemporary composer Max Richter, was also being given his EIF debut this year, the chance to stage the UK première of one of their joint offerings, Kairos (2014) set to Richter's "Recomposed Vivaldi - Four Seasons", was obviously irresistible.That Kairos had Read more ...