It’s been 16 years since New York City Ballet appeared in London, and its too-brief visit to Sadler’s Wells offered a welcome chance to encounter a previously unseen range of repertory and personnel. Perhaps the company can never be what it was when I first saw it as a youngster – its founder George Balanchine
Fifteen years after her death and the shrine to Pina Bausch is still thick with incense and adulation. Whether one acknowledges her as a genius or not, there’s no doubt that her influence has been baneful – a cult that has spawned a thousand imitators, all following her absurdist idiom, all mesmerised by subversions of
Literate, thoughtful and serious, Kim Brandstrup ranks as one of the most honest and honourable of contemporary choreographers. A proper grown-up, scorning bad-boy sensationalism or visual gimmickry, he compensates in solid consistent craft for whatever he may lack in striking originality, and the double bill he presented earlier this month as part of Deborah Warner’s
Ballet has always suffered from a shortage of stories that can communicate without the medium of the spoken word or a lengthy synopsis in the programme. Recourse has often been made to familiar fairy tale and legend, but recently popular films and novels have also become a favoured source – Matthew Bourne, for instance, has
Two archetypal ballet heroines have been facing each other across WC2: at the Coliseum, Giselle the blameless virgin, wronged in the first act, disembodied in the second; at Covent Garden, Manon the seductive, manipulative courtesan who can’t choose between love and money. Both in different ways are victims of a cruel world, and both must
The Nutcracker is one of those Christmas traditions that turns out to be not very traditional at all. First performed in St Petersburg in 1892, it didn’t catch on outside Russia until the late 1950s, when Balanchine’s version for New York City Ballet was repeatedly screened on network television in the USA and Festival Ballet’s
When the Ballets Russes first presented Fokine’s Polovtsian Dances at Covent Garden in 1911, such was its orgiastic savagery that ladies in the audience were said to be genuinely terrified that its grease-painted warriors were about to leap off the stage and ravish them. The Mongol Khan, a great hit imported from Ulan Bator, may
It’s nearly a quarter of a century since Michael Nunn and William Trevitt bravely left their safe haven at the Royal Ballet to set up BalletBoyz, a company aimed at developing the underused potential of male dancers and exploiting Nunn and Trevitt’s passion for film technology. At the time this seemed like a useful mission
Ben Duke belongs to a class of younger choreographers who have decided to flout the convention that dancers should remain silent on stage. Liberating their voices is by no means a new phenomenon (in 1961 Frederick Ashton had Svetlana Beriosova speak verse by Gide in his sadly forgotten Persephone), but it’s one that particularly suits
Not being an aficionado of the heavy-metal genre, I snootily suspected that I would rather be standing in the rain flogging the Big Issue than suffer the racket that goes by the name of Black Sabbath. The noise, my dear, and the people! How could they? So I approached Birmingham Royal Ballet’s attempt to dance
Aaron S. Watkin, an affable bearded Canadian, is the new artistic director of English National Ballet. He arrives from Dresden, where he ran a similarly scaled company comfortably subsidised by public funds. Doubtless, he finds what the Arts Council gives ENB meagre to the point of stingy. One may wonder, therefore, what the attraction is,
One could soundly advise any choreographer to avoid music so transcendentally great in itself that dance can add nothing except banal images. Only a handful of exceptions sneak past the rule: MacMillan’s setting of Song of the Earth, perhaps, and also Hans van Manen’s Adagio Hammerklavier, his audacious attempt to visualise the infinitely slow movement
In 2015 Carlos Acosta announced his retirement from the Royal Ballet and the classical repertory. It seemed like the right moment; he was 42 and, truth to tell, some of us could detect a slight waning of his prowess and physique. Time to move on: since then, he has done great work in his native
Having been unexpectedly delighted by the Royal Ballet’s revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s Corybantic Games at Covent Garden last week, I slapped my wrists for underrating him as a prolific craftsman. After a second exposure to his Cinderella, handsomely mounted by English National Ballet at the Royal Albert Hall, I have reverted to that ho-hum view.
My witty friend whispered that Wayne McGregor’s new ballet Untitled, 2023 put her in mind of Google HQ – it’s certainly a mint-cool, squeaky-clean, future-perfect affair. The set by Carmen Herrera, subtly lit by Lucy Carter, suggests infinite space and distant horizons. The costumes by Burberry are streamlined and sexless. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s vaporous score hovers
This month I’ve been venturing into the further reaches of modern dance – obscure territory where I don’t feel particularly comfortable. In its hinterland is the Judson Church in New York: it was here, during the early 1960s, that young Turks such as Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton began investigating the idea that dance need
Fulfilling its sacred duty to serve regions that higher culture tends to avoid, Birmingham Royal Ballet made a midweek visit to the troubled city of Peterborough. Its New Theatre holds about 1,200 and is normally focused on tribute bands and stand-ups; I would guess that for Carlos Acosta’s Classical Selection only about 60 per cent
Yes, yes, I know. You’ve had your fill of David Attenborough’s jeremiads, you’ve heard enough already about climate change catastrophe. You’ve got the message, ordered the electric car and solar panels: now can we talk for a moment about something less unthinkably apocalyptic? The point is as much to celebrate the grace and beauty of
If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by puffs from authorities proclaiming the show to be ‘very, very on top’ and ‘an exemplary display of excellence’. This primitive advertising strategy seems to have worked: on the night I went, the Hammersmith Apollo (capacity
It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he
