Ballet

Thursday

Giannandrea Poesio

Gusto galore from Boston Ballet

Those who lament sluggishness in contemporary stagings of Balanchine’s ballets — and those who are responsible for it — should have seen and learnt from Boston Ballet last week. Forget the funereal tempi we, in the old world, are forced to accept because of the killjoy aesthetics favoured by artistically challenged ballet directors and teachers. Boston Ballet’s Serenade had all one would wish for: quick, sparkling tempi, a splendid use of the space, majestic flow and gusto galore. It’s true that precision might have gone astray now and then, but never in a major way; besides, real artistry has always had little to do with precision. What I particularly enjoyed

Thursday

Julie Kavanagh

Nijinsky, by Lucy Moore – review

The first biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, which appeared in 1934, was written by his wife Romola with the help of two ghosts — the young Lincoln Kirstein and Little Blue Bird, an obliging spirit called up by a psychic medium to provide information from beyond the grave. Needless to say, the book wasn’t entirely accurate; and nor, two years later, was her edition of Nijinsky’s confessional diaries, a stream-of-consciousness record of his descent into madness, which she censored, restructured and cut by over a third. It took Richard Buckle’s now classic life of the dancer (published in l971 and amended after Romola’s death) to sort fact from fiction and recreate

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Steps to destruction

I have always suspected that, if you look for the black swan within yourself, it will end in tears, and now Darren Aronofsky has proved me right. It will end in tears, as well as bloody gashes, horrors glimpsed in mirrors, warped hallucinations of a sexual nature and breaking your mother’s hand in a door jamb. If you think you may have the black swan within you, just leave well alone. Go shopping. Play Scrabble. Clear out the hall cupboard, as you have been meaning to do for ages (I don’t think you can squeeze another thing in there, although, God bless you, you will keep trying). And if you

Giannandrea Poesio

Still life

Ballet is a dying art, according to Jennifer Homans’s bestselling history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels. Ballet is a dying art, according to Jennifer Homans’s bestselling history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels. Sensationalist as it may sound, this claim is cogently argued at the end of the book, which turns dreary ballet history into an engaging narrative. Inevitably, the statement has ruffled many feathers, particularly among those ‘hyperspecialists’, ‘balletomanes’ and ‘insiders’ who, she says, speak an ‘impenetrable theory-laden prose’ and have reduced dance to a ‘recondite world’. Indeed, the worrying demise of classical theatre-dance depends greatly on the mental onanism of some scholars, as well as on the art-less vision of teachers

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Visual pleasure

According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. Well, his work is certainly a pleasant sensory experience. Neat patterns of colour, possibly recalling the chakras or energy centres that, in Eastern philosophy, govern our senses and feelings, mark the sections of this one-hour dance. The undeniable prowess of the nine handsome black male dancers with their superbly co-ordinated movements, derived from a mix of idioms, adds

Wednesday

Rupert Christiansen

Dancing in the dark

Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. His obsession with victims, outsiders and extreme psychological states reflects the panic in his own tortured and alienated psyche. His choreography contains a lot of silent screaming: it brutalises the human body as much as it beautifies it. Sex in his work is presented as a violent compulsion — often a rape — rather than an ecstatic release or an